Studies in
American
Indian
Literatures

EDITORMALEAPOWELLMichiganStateUniversity

Published by The University
of Nebraska Press

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Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL ISSN
0730-3238) is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses
exclusively on American Indian literatures. SAIL is published
quarterly by the University
of Nebraska Press for
the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL).
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The editorial board of SAIL invites the submission of scholarly,
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Indian literatures as well as the submission of poetry and short fiction,
bibliographical essays, review essays, and interviews. We define
"literatures" broadly to include all written, spoken, and visual
texts created by Native peoples.

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Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance
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Daniel Heath Justice Department of English, University of Toronto
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SAIL is available online through Project MUSE at
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Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Anthropological
Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Bibliography
of Native North Americans, Current Abstracts, Current
Contents/Arts & Humanities, ERIC Databases, IBR: International
Bibliography of Book Reviews, IBZ: International Bibliography of
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Premier.

An enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, Kimberly Blaeser was raised on the White Earth Reservation in
northwestern Minnesota.
Blaeser is a professor of English and comparative
literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she teaches Native
American literature. She is has written three collections of poetry, Trailing
You, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Apprenticed to Justice, and
an academic study of fellow White Earth writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor, titled Gerald Vizenor:
Writing in the Oral Tradition, and edited an anthology of short fiction
by Anishinaabe writers called Stories Migrating
Home. Blaeser has published more than sixty
articles, personal essays, poems, and short stories in American and Canadian
journals, newspapers, and collections and is the recipient of numerous
awards.
This transcribed and subsequently
collaboratively edited interview is part of a larger book-length project on
recent Native North American women poets' use of humor and irony. The following
conversation took place in March 2003 at Blaeser's
home in rural Wisconsin
and since has been updated several times via e-mail.

JENNIFER ANDREWS: I want to start by
asking how your poetry informs your scholarship, and vice versa. I'm thinking
particularly of the haiku poems you've authored and your analysis of the
haiku form in your book on Gerald Vizenor.

KIMBERLY BLAESER: In some ways I
think there's a tension that plays out between the creative and the academic,
and it might be because there's an inbred expectation of what it means to be
an aca-{2}demic.
And so, of course, I resist that, and it's apparent in some of my critical
pieces. I tend to try to break open those expectations and deliberately not
fulfill them by doing instead whatever it is I want to do in my discussion of
the texts. I was telling you about that book that Craig Womack and a couple
of other people are editing; the essay I did for them is not at all what you
would think of as a classic academic essay. I'm playing a lot with that form
and allowing the parts of my work, and ways of thinking and dealing with
language, to mingle and come closer together. With haiku, it's a slightly
different situation, because the way that Vizenor
himself engages with the idea of haiku or haiku theory is creative. His
language about it is creative, and it's energizing, not static in the way
that we think of academic accounts or descriptions. So I think that the very
essence of haiku makes the possibility of writing about it easier because it
brings the creative and the critical closer together.

JA:
What you've said about playing with form is really interesting, because your
book on Vizenor is classically academic in
structure and tone but written in a very accessible way. So it seemed you
were already playing with the form of scholarly texts by making your
monograph accessible and, in particular, making Vizenor's
language accessible, which is often tricky. Speaking of influence, in your
first book of poems, Trailing You, you begin the collection with a
preface that celebrates the influence of family and friends. Collectivity
seems to be central in the preface: the idea that there isn't a stereotypical
solitary writer. And then there's a whole section of poems in the second
book, "From One Half-Mad Writer to Another," which dialogues with
and pays tribute to a variety of writers and different languages. I was
wondering if you could talk a bit about how other writers have influenced
your work.

KB:
That's a great question. The idea of feeling that none of this is something
that is only my voice is just the way I understand story, or even understand
identity. I so much feel that anything I say, think, am, be, write -- all of
that -- is inevitably intertwined beyond our ability to track it back. I think
that from the uterus, and beyond, we're linked to other people, to other
stories, voices, and experiences. In my family there was so much oral
exchange because early on we {3} lived in
the middle of nowhere with my grandparents; we didn't have television or any
of those kinds of things, and part of the whole process of everyday life was
this lively oral exchange. People would tell stories; they would mimic one
another; they would tease; they would joke; they would sing. I was really
quite shy and quiet as a child in the midst of all this
hullabaloo, but it embedded itself, and I imagine marked me in a certain way,
and I feel that is part of who I am. So when I come to any kind of writing, I
know that those voices are there, whether or not I can identify them. The
source is not just me; it could never be just me.
Then, in other ways that are more traceable, I
consciously commit to memory things that I think are important to remember:
what people said, details about people's lives, or details about places I'd
be shown and the story someone would tell about it -- "this is the lake
Grandpa Bunker said had the best tasting rice" -- or whatever they were
saying. I would make a conscious effort to remember. Because another thing
that was important to so many people in my family was memory. We lived by
memory. And everyone had a story about someone beyond them. That kind of
process was just something that you learned. I think in some ways that
dedication to memory is a gift that you are given. So I both consciously
commit events and words to memory, and I also intuitively hold on to things,
knowing there's some reverberation I need to think about later. And then I
think there are things that are somewhat more mysterious: there are so many
times when what becomes the source for a poem is a voice that speaks a line
or a phrase or something that I hear, and I hear in a way that I guess you
would say is spiritual, or subconscious; it's given to me. It's not something
that I feel that I'm creating. It really does come from someplace I don't
quite understand. There's also a conscious effort to carry and tell the
stories that I think other people didn't have an opportunity to tell or
record, or that weren't valued in a certain way at the time; I feel that that
is my privilege, but it's also my responsibility. I do owe something; I
survived because of those stories, because of those occurrences, because of
those people.

JA:
It's fascinating to hear you talk about the power of collectivity in your own
work and how a single voice can speak for a community.

{4}KB: The
leaders in many of the Indian communities were leaders because they were
orators. The other part of your question that I don't think I answered was
about my second collection, Absentee Indians, where a lot of the
poems are engaging with the writing of other writers. That again is because I
feel that there is a celebration of influence in Native literature, and I am
happy to be a part of that. I don't want to pretend or to set myself up as
some individual creator, as it were, because I know so well that I'm not. So
I feel that having a conversation that moves from this book to that book to
this book -- that cuts across years and different voices -- is more enriching
for readers and also for me as a writer. I think it's important to notice
that things that Indian authors like Gary Hobson or Denise Sweet or Joy Harjo or whomever might have
written have echoes and that those echoes will appear, for example, in my
book. In some places I borrow from specific texts, like in that very last
poem in my second collection ("Y2K Indian"), where I literally
build part of that poem from the words of other poets. But in other places it
might be an allusion or a gesture to something that someone else has said or
written.

JA: I
wanted to ask you about the photographic collage at the beginning of Trailing
You. How did you pick the photos, and what do they add to the text? It
seemed to me that there was an incredibly rich dialogue between the poetry
and the photos, and the fact that you haven't included captions or identified
who is in them means that readers engage with the photos differently than
they might otherwise.

KB:
That was part of my intention, because I didn't want the photographs to
represent a single, identifiable person. There's one photo in particular that
I was just thrilled to use because it's a photo of one of my aunties when she
was a young girl, and she looks absolutely identical to the way her daughter
looked at the time that the book was put together. So even if someone picked
it up who knew those two, they wouldn't necessary know whose photograph had
been included. And so again, it's like a gesture, it's like a movement into
the past. In a sense the photos in Trailing You are not fixed in time
because there's a photo there that could be me or could be my mom. In the
collage, there are photos there that could be my rela-{5}tives or they could be
twenty other families' relatives. I also wanted to avoid including any of
those classic static romantic Indian poses; instead, some of the photos I
selected are kind of funny. There's the one of three of my cousins where two
of them have dolls by the hands and one of them has my brother. They are
family photos that I had affection for to begin with, because I care about
the people, and they brought back memories, which seems appropriate given
that so many of the poems in that collection are memory poems. But at the
same time I didn't want the photographs to be so specific; the images are
intended to open a dialogue with the reader and not merely foreclose an
imaginative interaction between reader and text.

JA:
Did you meet with any resistance from the publisher?

KB: Oh
no, my publisher actually welcomed the idea of the collage. Joe and Carol Bruchac'sGreenfield Review published Trailing
You, and, of course, Joe just loved the idea of the collage and was
really happy to include the images.

JA: In
the first poem of the collection, called "Speaking Those Names,"
you pay tribute to the power of the spoken language and celebrate the acting
of naming. How do you see the oral tradition and speech utterances
influencing your poetry?

KB: I
think that the idea of being called a name and being among people who know your
name might have more authority in the Indian community, because Native people
can have so many names, and there's the idea that your name can change
throughout your life. And in many tribes you're not to disclose your Indian
name. That sort of giving of and becoming a name is a very interesting
process: it has to do with being part of a community. I think the other thing
that's fed into that poem, which is probably not so obvious, is that for me,
naming or knowing the people who named you is another one of those survival
tools that I used when I was away from home. It was a way of reclaiming my
balance when things became incredibly complex, and I began to lose a sense of
where I fit in things. Because part of what these names tell you is where you
fit. And that goes back to the same idea of not being single, because somehow
each of these names is locked by tentacles to the being of other people; your
history and their history are intertwined.

{6}JA: What
about the other spoken and written languages that you use in your second
collection of poems, Absentee Indians? You seem quite comfortable
writing in other languages, most obviously Ojibwe
and Spanish.

KB: I
think that there are probably a number of things that come into play,
especially when I write in Ojibwe. One of them is
that I grew up hearing the Ojibwe language a great
deal, but I lack the ability to speak it very well. My grandmother would have
been fluent in Ojibwe, as would my older aunts and
uncles. However, the younger brothers and sisters, including my mother, were
not fluent. And my generation is pretty much in the same position, but as
children, our grandparents and older aunts and uncles would encourage us and
tease us to learn certain things. So we'd use a mix of languages, and the
sentences would sometimes combine Indian and English together. And then words
became distorted and transformed in really interesting ways. We used to use a
word like "bangii" to mean broken or
messed up. Then when I came across it in Ojibwe I
discovered it really means "a little bit." So we distorted that
meaning. So there were these interesting transformations in the language, and
the creation of a mixed-up language came to represent the situation of
several generations who could no longer be considered fluent speakers of our
native tongue. Salvaging the language, giving it a place, and reclaiming it,
trying to recover it, becomes important. Decolonizing our lives has to do
with reclaiming the language. That became symbolic for me. I use the multiple
languages because I want to acknowledge that people are mixed; they're not
isolated individuals. I want to acknowledge the mixed nature of our reality,
which is partly about this conglomeration of languages, which is not like
a Tower of Babel.

JA: I
was thinking of the poems in Absentee Indians where you use the Ojibwe language without providing translations. And
that's really wonderful, because there's a sense for me, as someone who
doesn't know Ojibwe, of being on the outside, which
forces me to reconsider my relationship to the text and my assumptions about
possessing "insider" status. And the mixing of language in those
poems appears seamless, creating a wonderful visual representation of
bilingualism. {7}Those poems are
fascinating because they so cleverly challenge the colonization of language,
and especially the assumption that English is dominant and should be.

KB: So
often readers presume that English can adequately represent everything else
that's been colonized. What I try to tell my students about reading Native
literature is that they have to try to enter it from the perspective of the
culture from which it was written.

JA:
And students have to make a commitment to study the text closely and
carefully, rather than simply saying, "Well, I don't need to do this
because it's going to require me to do some extra labor." One aspect of
your poetry that I really enjoyed was the playful and often ironic poetic
voice that frequently recurs in both collections, from "Sleeping with
Mackenzie," in which the housecat becomes the source of sexuality and
seduction, to "Who Takes Me to Places Where Poetry Lives," which
invokes the paradoxes of someone who sees himself outside of poetry yet
fundamentally influences its creation. At times you use a more sharply ironic
tone, as in "On the Way to the ChicagoPow-wow" and "Dear Andy Rooney."
Could you talk about humor and irony in your poetry: how you use them and
whether you see humor and irony as having a traditional grounding within
tribal communities?

KB:
When I create things that use an ironic voice, I'm not sure how conscious
that is. I think it might actually stem more from the experience of learning
to survive as a mixed-blood and having encountered various kinds of
colonization. So many Indian people really have this incredibly wonderful
ironic sense of humor. And many of the exchanges between relatives and in
everyday settings are so filled with humor and playfulness. But sometimes
consciously, say in the Andy Rooney poem, I thought that putting it in a way
that was somewhat playful would mean that people would resist it less and be
more ready to receive the message. Part of the way that irony works is that
it requires the reader to participate, to decipher what's going on, so that's
a way of pulling someone into the process. I think that's what you do when
you play with language among your friends and family too; it's an exchange,
it's an engagement, it's fun. It's probably just
another way of opening up the poetry, taking it out of the {8} solitary state. There are obviously
different kinds of humor that I use. The poem in Absentee Indians that's
called "Twelve Steps toward Our Homesickness" is more overtly
humorous. Readers don't have to work at it; they just get a good laugh. But
then I undercut that with a moment or a line that is serious. Then the
serious may startle a little bit more. A lot of how I judge what's going to
happen is by reading things out loud, and I try to hear it in a voice that
isn't necessarily mine, to hear it as a performance piece.

JA:
One thing I thought about asking you when you were talking was who do you
think your readers are? Do you have a sense of who buys and reads your
poetry?

KB: I
have a vision of different groups of readers. I know that I write for a
Native audience -- that's my heart; I want those people to be laughing if
something's funny, or I want those people to say, ahh,
I remember; I want them to connect with the poems. And I also want, as anyone
does, to write for a broader audience, and to bridge some of the differences,
and hope that a part of what I'm doing is showing that there's a universal
quality in humanity and in some of these classic experiences like love and
loss. I also hope that as I'm developing as a poet, I'm writing for poets.
When I do readings -- that's an amazing thing,
doing readings -- I almost never know what I'm going to read. I might have an
idea, but I want to see who the audience is first. Sometimes it's nerve
wracking because you don't really know who will be there. I did a reading in
northern Wisconsin,
in Stephen's Point, and there was -- though I didn't discover this until
partway through -- a group of poets in the audience who were writers of pantoums. And so, of course, I read a pantoum
and they were so delighted; that was the greatest thing for them. You try to
get a sense of what people are about and read for them.

JA: So
that they feel a connection to your poetry.

KB:
That's the most rewarding kind of feedback. I did a reading this year at WesternKentuckyUniversity,
and I had an unexpectedly large audience. I thought it was going to be the
middle of nowhere, but the room was full and there were people out in the
hallway, and there were a lot of writing students there. And you feel really
great {9} when they say to you, oh I feel
so inspired now to write. Because that's what you want to do too. But I think
various poems are directed at very different audiences. I have this long fishhouse poem, and there are not too many people I could
read that to. . . .

JA: I
also wanted to ask you about the poem I mentioned earlier: "Who Takes Me
Places Where Poets Live." The older man who's the subject of the poem
claims to have trouble understanding poetry except as sound, which he says he
can understand as music. The link between music and poetry is an important
one for several other Native North American women writers. I'm thinking here
specifically about poets like Joy Harjo, who has
recorded songs of her poetry, using the written texts as lyrics. It's often
difficult for academics to make sense of this blurring of genres -- what's a
poem, what's a piece of music, are these song lyrics, are they not? Is music
an integral part of your work?

KB: That's
a really important link for me because there are lots of places where they
are so close that you couldn't take them apart. Obviously, if you look at
Native oral traditions, many of what we call poems are
song-poems, and they were performed that way. I also sing some of my poems;
one titled "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way," which has country
and western lyrics, I wrote for Craig Womack. I was doing a reading for the
MLA [Modern Languages Association] conference when it was in Chicago in 1995. The reading was at the
Newberry Library, and Craig showed up with his guitar and we sat outside the
ladies room and tried that song/poem together and then went up and performed
it. It was one of those moments when things just worked. We were playing,
making jokes, living the poem.

JA:
The song-poem is very exciting because it moves beyond a single genre,
challenging academics to think differently about how writing works, or how
language works.

KB:
And there are so many Native writers that are mixed-genre writers.

JA:
When you teach creative writing, do you ever talk about the genre?

KB: I
do, but I usually talk about it with respect to other writers.

JA:
It's hard to teach your own work.

{10}KB: I'm
doing this Ojibwe literature class, Ojibwe Literature of the Great Lakes, and this is the
first time I've ever actually put some of my own work onto the syllabus,
which has been fun.

JA:
How have the students responded?

KB:
They do a fairly good job of picking out meanings. It is also a great
opportunity to talk about the distinctions between the narrator of the story
and Kim Blaeser the author. I find it easier to do
that with my own work than to presume to know about somebody else's. I think
it's really interesting to see whether what you thought the poem was doing
actually works out. But then half the time we as poets don't know what we're
doing anyway. The writing is intuitive. I strongly believe that part of what
makes a writer is intuition; it's a felt movement, and part of that is sound.

JA:
One of your poems, "Surviving Winter or Old Stories We Tell Ourselves
When a Blizzard is Coming," epitomizes the power of sound and its
repetition. Without stories, told over and over again, there is no hope of
survival. The poem reminded me of Joy Harjo's
"Anchorage,"
which pays tribute to AudreLorde.
In "Anchorage,"
the speaker talks about the need to tell stories of survival even if they
seem impossible to believe. I was interested to hear your thoughts on
storytelling as survival.

KB:
Most of my ancestors were so engaged in the process of simple survival that
they didn't have time to even think about the idea of survival. A lot of the
things that we do would have been out of reach for people who were living
hand to mouth, but that kind of survival was helped along by the belief that
comes to us through storytelling, through connections with people around us,
through watching the seasons unfold and seeing that other creatures can
survive the winter. So when I think about survival, it has to do always with
relationships and being within a community that is not only of people but is
a community of place and story and season. There are ways in which we very
consciously write about the survival of Indian people, which is now much more
linked to spiritual, emotional, and personal survival. Historical survival
has become to a large degree symbolic. Physical survival is more taken for
granted. There still is great poverty on reservation areas, and there are
high levels of {11} suicide, but there is
not a constant military threat. But we're still teaching one another to
survive, and we're still supporting one another through example or through
mentoring. That is all part of what I do as a writer; I hope that when I have
reached into my past to a poem, a story, someone's life experience, and
that's kept me going, or inspired me, I can also present that as a gift to
someone else. Part of what we try to do with our writing, I think, is not
just to be literature but to be about survival, to be about life. I call that
a supra-literary intention. For Native writers, the very act of writing is a
claiming of survival, and it's also the passing on of possibility. There is a
dedication within the literature that refuses to forget that our ancestors
were people on the brink of extinction.

JA: In
your poetry and your critical work, you talk about the challenges of
theorizing and teaching Native literatures, and you suggest that
tribal-centered criticism is a viable alternative to more traditional Western
theoretical frameworks. What characterizes tribal-centered criticism?

KB:
I've been thinking again this semester about how to get students to read, and
because we're studying the Ojibwe literatures of
the Great Lakes, that's an opportunity to
get them to explore a tribal-centered reality. I'm teaching undergraduates,
so the course is not overly theoretical. But I'm encouraging all students to
acknowledge that even in the use of language you're coming from a different
perspective. And that seems to be the first hurdle to go through, just
getting the students, the readers, to acknowledge that they have to position
themselves differently to read the work. I think that Craig Womack's Red
on Red was a really good attempt at doing this.

JA:
The way in which you talk about a tribal-centered approach seems fruitful to
me. For example, I recently vetted a journal article on Lee Maracle'sRavensong,
in which the author did a Bakhtinian reading
of the text. One of the things that you talk about in your essay published in
Looking at Our Words is how Bakhtin is
useful but removed from Native culture. You suggest that it would be more
productive to employ theories that are created by from and dialogue with
Native critics and writers. Having just read your essay, I found this Bakhtinian analysis of Maracle
particularly frustrating because {12} the
theoretical model was simply placed on top of the text; the article seemed to
sidestep any real engagement with the text because it would have been too
complicated, too messy.

KB:
Yes, I know what you mean. At the time that I was writing about Vizenor's haiku, I realized that looking at his haiku in
relationship to the haiku tradition is important, but not to look at it in
relation to the dream song tradition would be crazy, because that's so
important to it. And the same thing is true with Gordon Henry's work. In his
novel The Light People, there's a section called "The Prisoner
of Haiku" that was published separately as a short story. It's this incredible
story that has to do with the relationship between the dream song and the
haiku, and within the story there's this wonderful haiku sequence filled with
historical allusions. For example, Henry alludes to the naming of people with
an "X," much like the "X" on the treaty documents. He
also uses bits of Native language here and there and incorporates different
traditions that come from the history of the Ojibwe
people and the culture and the language and the land. One haiku links the
tracks of birds in dirt to hieroglyphs. It's very much informed by a
contemporary tribal perspective. And yet it's performing as haiku as well and
thus has this link to the dream song. I think that's a perfect example of
showing you the multiple dimensions of Native writing. If you're going to
read his work, you can't possibly read it without coming from that Ojibwe perspective as well.

JA: So
much of recent Native criticism in Canada
and the United
States
has wrestled with the question of whether to simply apply theoretical
concepts to Native works and integrate them into the larger discussion of
literary theory or to think about these texts and their cultural contexts
differently. And that's why the idea of tribal-centered criticism seems very
appealing; it moves beyond that either/or dilemma by turning the assumption
of needing to name and label a particular text on its head.

KB:
Who's to say that someone else's name for something is more important.

JA:
Speaking of names and naming, what formal aspects of poetry most appeal to
you, and which ones most bother or frustrate you as {13}
a poet? I noticed that in Absentee Indians there are a lot more
prose poems; your poetic voice is becoming more flexible. Are there certain
formal or thematic elements that inspire you?

KB: I
try to concentrate on finding the form for each piece as it arises. Which is
sometimes, again, intuitive, and sometimes not. But I have for a long time
been really interested in the prose poem, and in blurring the distinctions
between prose and poetry. I've also been experimenting with visual
presentation by butting words against one another on the page and eliminating
commas and capital letters. Part of my effort in any of these formal
decisions has to do with sound. I hope I'm getting better at trying to
translate the sounds I hear onto the page. I hope that the voices that speak
-- a lot of times I use italics for a spoken voice -- don't all sound the
same, because they're not. I want to become better at imitating the sounds
that are in my head, or in my memory. Again, it's the oral or the performative quality that dictates what gets on the page.
And so I'm experimenting with things like line breaks or stanzas. Inflection
is important in so many places, and it is a challenge to get inflection on
the page.

JA: I
wanted to ask you about transformation, which is something that a lot of
Native American women poets discuss. For instance, Paula Gunn Allen talks about
transformation ostensibly as a tribal ceremony and theme. She says that
transformation is a central part of American Indian poetry, of its extinction
and regeneration. And she argues that the only kind of poetry Native American
poets now can write is about the process of extinction and regeneration
through transformation. I wondered if you've thought about that term, and if
so how might you talk about it?

KB: I
have thought about it. One thing that Paula Gunn Allen does is she hyphenates
the word "remembering," making it "re-membering."
By including that hyphen, she stresses the idea of putting something back
together; I've always thought that's a really wonderful way of understanding
that word. Because memory is so important, serving as a kind of adhesive, it
does put things back together, and it makes intergenerational connections.
The whole idea of transformation is, of course, a spiritual notion. And it's
somewhat illogical, so people want to pin it down -- is it literal? is it figurative? how do {14} we mean it? -- but
I think it has to mean everything or we couldn't believe the possibilities it
offers. With my students, just to have them be open to the possibility of
transformation operating on many levels, I'll start by describing something very
physical like the transformation of a caterpillar to a moth. You see
something that was crawling on the ground that is now flying about. It's been
transformed. It literally changes form. And then I try to open up the
possibility of there being things that we don't understand. How do we know
what happens ceremonially in any religion? I'll often use a Christian example
like transubstantiation and ask whether that's something they can believe or
understand and whether it's metaphorical or literal and what it does to us
when we accept it in one way or in all ways. And then what happens when we
are recipients or participants in the life of imagination, story, poetry, or
song? Some sort of change takes place, but is it transformation? If language
has that power to really move us, to literally change our thinking, and if
who we are depends on how we think, and I think it does, then we are
transformed. When things bump against each other, they transform one another,
and that relationship happens in many places including texts. If you use a
word in the beginning of a collection of poetry, and it gradually begins to
gather speed, or force, or velocity, or it begins to accumulate some other
meanings or broaden out or open up, by the time you see that word at the end
of a text it's been transformed and your thought process to a certain degree
has been transformed. There's a movement right now called Poets Against the
War: Do we recognize the power of poetry to actually transform the way people
think and act? I think Native people for centuries have believed in the
possibility of language being transformative. If we're talking about
contemporary reality, it makes sense that this understanding would be a part
of that supra-literary reality that I talk about in terms of Native
literature.

JA:
You get that sense with transformation that it is almost unnameable,
indescribable, and that's part of what I think is really interesting about
it. And it's something that a lot of Native American, particularly women,
poets talk about.

KB:
This is a question, because I haven't thought about it before,{15} but do you think it might be because women
bear children and therefore are the vessels for a particularly dramatic form
of physical transformation?

JA: I
think so. I think that pregnancy and birth is actually a large part of it,
because it is a very clear example of"trans"and
"formation," an acknowledgement of change and metamorphosis that is
both life changing and life affirming. Similarly, there's always a moving, living
increment or part of the poem that's transforming through reading, through
performing, through engagement with a reader that you can't predict, that you
can't hold onto. Which is really wonderful, and celebrated, it seems to me,
in a very positive way.

KB: I
think you just said something important when you said you can't hold on to
transformation, because it's the possession that people want, and perhaps
that's why they resist the notion of transformation because you can't possess
something that's changing before your eyes.

JA:
Exactly. And that's why talking about transformation is exceedingly difficult
too, because it isn't easily pinned down. As we've just noted, motherhood is
an example of transformation, a change that you talk about in a detailed and
moving way in the section called "Motherbirth"
in Absentee Indians. What inspired you to write these poems?

KB:
After I had Gavin, my first child, the writing time seemed to disappear, but
I was more inspired to write than ever. In fact, I wrote the poem that's
called "Motherbirth" in the hospital
after he was born. I was so in that moment of having this ecstatic experience, and I wrote that poem at I think it was three
o'clock in the morning. So I began then, and there were so many moments that
were what I call haiku moments. I couldn't let them go, and yet I didn't have
big spaces of time, so I began to write small, little pieces, and a lot of
the poems I wrote around that time were short or haiku or snatches. The other
thing that fascinated me, and I think I've written more about it in prose, is
the language of children. The acquisition of language, but also the
imaginative way they express themselves -- "Mommy, What Color Is
Fast" -- that is so playful that it takes you out of your staid use of
certain kinds of words. There's a poem in Absentee Indians{16} called "Up-Ducky-Down" that uses
some of the little words that children make up, or the way that they
interpret a word.

JA:
What I liked about that section of poems was the sense of celebration and
emphasis on a generational connectedness, which was really intimate and
wonderful. Dreaming is also linked to birth and transformation in your
poetry; what does the act of dreaming offer you as a writer?

KB: I
think that growing up the way that I grew up, in a culture where dreams were
very important and where we used to sit around and tell our dreams, it's
always been important to me to recognize that dreams have power, and that
they will bring you ideas and knowledge because they function in a place
where there aren't the same barriers we have when we're awake. If we allow
that to help us in our waking hours, they really can enrich our lives. And
there is a symbolic reality to dreaming too. Dreams have a history.

JA: You
also talk extensively about ritual in "Rituals, Yours and Mine,"
and it is central to much of your work. How do you
define ritual; what does it mean to you?

KB: I
think it's one of those words that people think of as having a small confined
meaning, but in fact I think it has such a large meaning. Ritual as being a
ceremonial act is one thing, but then ritual has to do with connections and
repetitiveness and history, how we have certain ways of doing things that we
do all the time, and when we go back to do something we do it that way
because we've done it that way before and it means something to us because it
reminds us of the other times that we did whatever we're doing. And because
it has a history it contributes to the current performance of the act. The
challenge I face as a writer is how to incorporate ritual into a text. I
think in a text there's always allusion, but there are other things like
repetition. I keep thinking about gesture; the text may speak about gesture,
but it may also be a gesture. And that gesture may be something long-standing
and repeated like a ritual. There can be everyday rituals or ceremonial
rituals, and I don't see them as that distinct from one another because they
both help us feel the strands that connect us. I think we take comfort in
ritual, but it's also another of those things that we perform because it's an
act of responsibility {17} or
response-ability. It's a response, a give and a take, and it is also
something that we owe, that we're responsible for, and it returns to us a
larger ability to be. When I think about things in my own life, I often link
them to things in my past life or to my parents or my grandparents or my
longer-ago historical relatives or a larger mass of the Ojibwe
people. I try to bring in the small details of rituals to keep that
connection alive. To somehow perform that in poetry is an interesting task.

JA:
"Rituals, Yours and Mine" is a tribute to the daily rituals that
you witness being performed by an older generation, a form of memorializing
that celebrates the immediacy of these acts and the fact that they are passed
on from generation to generation. You acknowledge that the daily, the
quotidian, is important in constructing your identity and your sense of self.

KB: We
can see that in children. For example, my daughter Amber, who is three years
old, has this incredible sense of ritual, of what we've done before and will
do again, and she anticipates events because they mean something special. If
she feels that sense of connection at three, multiply that over and over, and
it becomes inter-generational, the repetition of ritual becomes incredibly
powerful. It's something that takes you outside the idea of individuality,
again. I think memory becomes a kind of ritual too.

JA:
That would make sense because with memory there's often a recollection of
what is comforting and familiar and important.

KB:
And a recollection of the vocal. There's a way that people speak about
memory, and I try to bring that into my poetry; you could say that I
ritualize the vocal because I'm trying to -- it's not reenact so much as
somehow attempting to -- respeak. Because ritual
has a lot to do with the speaking of the same words, the singing of a certain
song, while being conscious in the moment. And I guess that's part of why we
invest ourselves in ritual. The respeaking is not
about language, but rather it's about going beyond language.

JA: If
moving beyond the limits of language is an integral part of your poetry, what
do think of scholars who might want to label you and your writing feminist?
There are a lot of Native American women poets who talk about feminism as
tricky or difficult term, one that they don't really find useful.

{18}KB: It's
not a term that I tend to take up very often. I talk about women; I talk
about the power of women; I talk about mothers; I talk about the feminine. At
the same time, I think there's a sense in which the power of women has been
so long recognized in indigenous cultures that there's not the same sort of
struggle to gain recognition for yourself in the
eyes of society, because it already exists. What we've been taught as Indian
people, in my community, is that women are strong and powerful and that women
have held the family together and that women are the carriers of the stories
and the teachers and so on. Women were the ones who ensured the survival of
the population. I've always felt I'm in a place where I can do just whatever
I want. I've never really felt restrictions. Maybe that's why it hasn't been
a great source of struggle, for me. And I think there's so many ways in which
I've broken stereotypes about women, and maybe didn't even realize that until
I came away from the reservation and saw that some of the things I did were
thought to be "male" activities, even something as simple as being
a good poker player. My thought process in relation to that really was
engaged more when I became involved in an academic community because that's
where the discussions were raised. The University of Notre Dame, where I did
my graduate work and first taught after completing the doctorate, was a
little paternalistic, so that might have been where I had my rude awakening
to what went on in the rest of the world. It wasn't so much individual
people; it was the way the institution acted. There have been moments in my
academic career when I bumped against someone and I've been stupefied because
I just didn't realize that this sort of attitude existed, because I really
didn't have that much exposure to it. Which is a very lucky thing, I guess.

JA:
It's wonderful! If you have good mentors as a student and new faculty member,
you are much better able to handle institutional pressures.

KB: So
much of the mentoring that came to me came from other Indian people, often in
different parts of the country, and the Indian men were just as supportive as
the Indian women. There's been a celebration of the power of women among the
people that I've known throughout my life. And that means when I was home at
White Earth, {19} and among the people
that I was lucky enough to know when I was a graduate student. I've always
experienced strong women, and so it's not been an anomaly, it's been sort of
the ordinary, and that's what I take up in my work. And if I have an access
to prejudice against women, it's through the racism that Indian people have
experienced here. The similarity for me, the way I link them, is through
racism. Creatively, that's how I channel it.

JA:
Place and community are obviously crucial to your identity, yet you have
spent much of your adult life away from White Earth. In Absentee Indians,
absence from the reservation and the challenge of returning to it are
prevalent themes. More specifically, you talk about the idea of doubleness in which one is always circling back and
returning to one's memories, which you characterize as a wrinkle or fold in
time. How does the idea of memory shape your poetry?

KB:
Another phrase that I think I've used is a ghost space in memory. And it's
really about being out of time, or time being irrelevant. There's a
timelessness, and there's something beyond the temporal, some kind of
connection. When there's a loss of time, of ego, of a lot of the sort of
things through which we ground ourselves as humans, it's sort of a spiritual
space. And it is one of those experiences or ecstatic moments of being beyond
the language that we have. It's a moment when you can't talk about it, but
you can gesture toward it. You hope that the language, like a haiku almost,
dissolves and the poetry wants to be experiential and not literary. Those
peak experiences, or ecstatic moments, are extraordinary in a way, but
they're not extra-ordinary in the sense of being inaccessible because they are
accessible to everybody. We should build our lives around them.

JA:
Your description of memory as a fold in time reminds me of recent critical
debates about how Native American notions of time are often simplified by
non-Natives to create a neat contrast between the linearity of Western
temporality and the circularity that characterizes Aboriginal concepts of
time. Marilyn Dumont, a Métis poet from Canada, actually has a poem
calling "Circling the Wagons," where she essentially says that to
describe Native ideas about time as circular is reductive. Your idea about
memory as a fold in time, and the way in which time is malleable, seems to
more accurately {20} capture a different
experience of time rather than simply saying it's linear or
circular.

KB:
Leslie Silko talks about time as a spider's web, in
which multiple things are going on. There's the circular shape, but there's
also the lateral, the different strands on the spider's web, and then I
envision what happens when a fly lands and there's a vibration. So we're
talking about the vibration, the motion, the movement, and I guess it's that
idea of being in the essence of movement that is in a continuum; we're in a
constant evolution and yet at the same time it reconnects us, and so it folds
back, and maybe it's like a . . .

JA: An
accordion.

KB:
Yeah! When you talk about a circle, you're still restricting it to a single
dimension.

JA:
Exactly, and I think Dumont is suggesting
that if you talk about circularity and linearity, what you're essentially
doing is reducing to a single dimension something that isn't reducible.
Speaking of multiplicity, what current projects are you working on?

KB:
There are several things I'm working on simultaneously. One of them is a new
collection of poems, which I see as a verbal and material collage, and it is
a family tree. It has a center poem that gives stanzas to different people
and family, and it's set up as a family tree would be on the page. Ideally,
individual stanzas will open up into other pieces that might be poetry or
might be prose or whatever. I expect the collection will include photographs
and other kinds of reproductions. There are some really cool letters that I
discovered that one of my uncles had written to my grandma when he was in the
military service, and I have all kinds of family memorabilia to integrate
into the collection: tribal enrolment cards, hunting licenses, and lots of
other things that give another dimension to the idea of generations and
family and history and place. I've been writing a lot of haiku, and I'd like
to do a haiku collection with photographs, in which the photographs might not
necessarily be that particular place, image, or whatever, but function as
haiku moments themselves.

JA: So
juxtapositions that may be unusual or startling, but a sense of replicating
that moment in the poem in a photograph in a way that's not literal.

{21}KB:
Right, right. I'm also editing a collection of Anishinaabe
poetry, and that'll probably be the first thing that's done because I have
most of that together. And I'm working with a photographer who's been taking
photos at White Earth for about ten or fifteen years, and I'm going to do the
text for it, though we're not even sure what kind of text that's going to be,
to go with the photos. And then the performative
element is becoming more important. I want to produce a CD of my poetry, some
with music, and maybe, if I can get to work with someone who's in film, put
together a poetry video.

NOTE

I am grateful to the Social Sciences and
Humanities Council of Canada for making this interview possible and to Erin
Whitmore for her careful transcription of the interview tapes.

{22}

More
Than One Way
to Tell a StoryRethinking the Place of
Genre in Native American
Autobiography and the Personal
Essay

TYRA TWOMEY

Native American autobiography is a problematic genre for historians and
literary scholars alike for a number of reasons. First, there is the
persistent question of authorship: because so many early Native
autobiographies were, to varying degrees, recorded, edited, rearranged, and
coauthored by whites, some scholars contest the idea that they be studied as
samples of Native American writing at all. Next is the cultural specificity
of the Western understanding of "autobiography," arguably a wholly
foreign concept to the traditions of story-making characteristic of Native
groups. The differences between Native autobiographies and their Western
counterparts raise an array of problematic questions, not only about the
conventions of autobiography as a literary genre, but also about the notions
of self-hood and identity that characterize the people who write
autobiographies. A case has been repeatedly made by literary scholars for the
inability of Native American writers to conceive of themselves independently
of their notions of tribal identity, for example. Other similar derivations
argue for Native views of the passage of time, personal success, cause and
effect, the nature of history, and meaning-making as differing from Western
perceptions, all in ways said to be observable through analysis of these
written records. Some writers seem content to draw conclusions about Native
peoples based on such observations; others, frustrated with the degree of
textual variation and authorial complexity these writings offer, have
wondered whether Native autobiographies should be considered a different
literary genre entirely. {23}
Although I begin with an investigation of some
of these complexities as they currently influence, and arguably impede,
literary study of Native autobiographies, my contention is that this last
question is both the most promising and the most emblematic of the basic
assumption clouding the work of those scholars who have tried for years to
unravel the mysteries of Native American autobiographical writing. In order
to understand these early writings it is necessary not only to separate them
from the conventional expectations of the generic Western autobiography but
also to distinguish between literary and rhetorical notions of genre itself.

TWO
CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES TO GENRE

Literary genre, following the classification system established in
Aristotle's The Poetics, has been traditionally understood as
"a formalistic classification of types of texts" (Devitt 697). In application, although this is an
oversimplification, a text belongs in a genre both because of how it is like
other texts in that genre and because of how it is unlike texts
in other genres.1 To question the inclusion of a particular work
in the category of "autobiography," or to examine the ways in which
its textual features distinguish it from other autobiographies, is to examine
the work through the lens of this literary view of genre, one which leads
directly to the kinds of broad cultural assumptions made above: if these
autobiographies are not like other autobiographies, it must be because their
authors are not like other authors.
Current rhetorical study, however, tends to
approach genre in a very different way. In a rhetorical understanding of the
term, according to scholars in the branch of rhetoric now calling itself
"genre theory," genres are not forms at all but rather
"typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations" (Miller
31), where "recurrent" describes similar situations arising under
similar circumstances and inspiring similar responses, and the forms produced
are the result of the rhetorical action best suited to the situation,
becoming typified by repeated application. Following this definition, a
rhetorical understanding of autobiography can only be gained through an {24} understanding of the situations that prompt
a writer to tell the story of his or her life. And if a piece of writing does
not seem to be an autobiography, what needs to be known to
understand the piece as it is, is not how it differs from things
that do seem to be autobiographies but what rhetorical context
called it into being, and what purpose was served by the rhetorical action
the written product represents.

THE QUESTION
OF AUTHORSHIP

By definition, in literary studies, an autobiography is a reflexive life
story, written by the person it is written about. But as
the studies in Arnold Krupat's 1985 For Those
Who Come After and David Brumble's 1988 American
Indian Autobiography demonstrate, pieces of writing published as the
autobiographies of early Native Americans were rarely the product solely of
the pen of the Native American "author" they portrayed.
Autobiographies were commonly "collected" by anthropologists studying
the customs of particular tribes. They were sometimes dictated directly to
amanuenses, sometimes translated before being transcribed, sometimes cowritten by Native and white writers, and sometimes
recorded as interviews and only later "edited" into narrative form.
Both Krupat and Brumble
offer evidence of the degree to which the words of Native speakers and
writers were vulnerable to influence and change by their collaborators. Krupat quotes John Neihardt,
the editor (or coauthor) of the autobiographical Black Elk Speaks, in
a candid admission of the influence he had on Black Elk's original words:
"'The beginning and ending are mine,' says Neihardt,
'they are what he would have said if he had been able. . . . And the
translation -- or rather the transformation -- of what was given to me was
expressed so that it could be understood by the white world'" (128). The
transcription notes and the historical facts of Black Elk's later life that Krupat presents in his analysis indicate clearly,
however, that the ending of the book in particular strongly misrepresents
Black Elk's intentions and beliefs. Brumble notes
similarly the danger of a Native story's being changed, however
unintentionally, by the simple interaction between Native narrators {25} and Western writers, who bring with them
their Western assumptions about the writing of life stories: in the very form
of the questions interviewers asked of those whose stories they were
recording, Brumble observes, they "led their
Indian autobiographers to think about their experiences in new ways"
(85). Such rethinking does not make those experiences less real to either the
individual who lived them or the audience who read about them later, of
course, but it does affect both their presentation and their contextual
surroundings -- the placement of an event in proximity to one part of the
tale instead of another, for example -- in ways that change the story.
These collected and coauthored tales, Brumble argues, "must distort the selves
they portray" (11, emphasis added). "There is a sense, of course,"hecontinues,"in
which every autobiography is a fiction of the self; no autobiography is a
'true' representation of the self in any absolute sense. But self-written
autobiography is at least the subject's own fiction . . . so it must always
be authentic in this sense at least." These collaborative efforts, by
contrast, are all affected, to varying degrees, by the influence of
outsiders' perspectives on the story being told, and Brumble
cautions readers to approach them with "considerable humility."
"Such autobiographies are, in an important sense, bicultural
documents," he contends, "texts in which the assumptions of Indian
autobiographers and Anglo editors are at work" (11, emphasis in
original). Although Brumble makes a distinction
between what he calls "as-told-to narratives" and the
autobiographical writing of Native Americans who could and did write in
English, there is a degree to which the "authenticity" a reader can
expect from either type of text is equally questionable. As scholar David
Murray reminds us, in our study of even those Indian writers who penned their
own stories, we, as later readers, cannot see inside these writers' minds to
know how they might have represented themselves to themselves or to
others like them: "We can only work . . . with the evidence we have
about how they represented themselves to whites" (53). Krupat and Brumble, among others, take particular interest in Sarah
Winnemucca's autobiography, Life among the Piutes,
for many reasons, not the least of which might be its ambiguous positioning
with relation to the previously mentioned distinctions.2 The text {26} calls authorship into question, because
although Winnemucca could and did read and write in English, her writing, by
her own admission, was never skilled, and although editor and personal friend
Mary Mann indicates in the book's preface that she only changed Winnemucca's
spelling to "correct orthography and punctuation," the reading
public has no way of knowing to what degree the women collaborated to produce
the text. Perhaps Winnemucca handed Mann a finished manuscript with only
spelling errors and "occasional emendations" (Hopkins 2) to polish, which act would make
Winnemucca the uncontested "author" of this literary document. Or
perhaps they met often to plan and discuss the text, in which meetings Mann's
ideas about writing -- organization, chronology, the relative importance of
events -- mixed with Winnemucca's to produce the final story, in which case
the artifact they produced would be a collaborative biographical study of a
different categorical nature. The text also challenges scholars' notions of
"authenticity": even Winnemucca's own ideas at the time of her
writing, some thirty years after her first contact with whites, could not
reflect the "authentic" mind of a precontact
Piute.3 Everything we know about Winnemucca -- and, through her,
about the Piutes -- is shaped by not only by Mann's
interventions but by Winnemucca's own awareness of her non-Native audience and
the non-Native ideas and attitudes that were influential throughout most of
her life.
Questions like these feed the fires of the
kinds of judgmental inquiry about Native American writers -- as writers and
as Native Americans -- that both shape and disfigure literary scholars'
understanding of their writing. Despite the genuine complexity of the
authorship of this bicultural document, scholars have little trouble
crediting Winnemucca with the work, and more seem intrigued than put-off by
the converging cultural influences shaping the narrative. Far more taxing is
its adherence to or deviation from the standard literary form of the
autobiography, and, subsequently, the ways in which its form, and the
assumptions that accompany it, seem to demonstrate to readers -- or to deny
-- Winnemucca's identity as an individual rather than always, first, as a
Piute.

{27}

WESTERN
VERSUS NATIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

The history of Western autobiography has been written "as the history
of the rise of the idea of the individual in the West," harking back, in
the works of different historians, to the ancient Greeks or the Egyptians (Brumble 4). The traditional form of works in this genre
parallels its history, telling the chronological story of the writer's life
as first the development of his or her own individuality and then the unique
accomplishments and perspectives this individuality allowed for.
Autobiographies, in the Western tradition, begin with the author's birth or
early childhood and progress through his or her life, focusing on occurrences
that led to personal growth or served as "turning points" in his or
her development. They assume that childhood is a necessary precursor to the
author's individual adulthood and that all stages in the writer's development
have value: their goal is "finding meaning in the whole life" (Brumble 85). The rhetorical situations prompting such
writings are likely to have, among their similarities, the writers' senses of
themselves as mature, self-aware, and successful or accomplished -- they must
have lived long enough to be able to make meaning of something approximating
a "whole life," and they must be able to reflect upon their own
turning points and past experiences of personal growth. Additionally, being
fully aware of the long history of Western autobiography, and presumably
having read the autobiographies of others, writers of autobiographies must
imagine a potential readership for whom their
individual story will have value and must craft the story to meet those
imagined expectations.
In his 1991"Native American Autobiography
and the Synecdochic Self," Arnold Krupat finds evidence of this emphasis on individuality
in standard Western autobiographical form in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose
self-definition Krupat quotes: "'I understand
my own heart,' Rousseau writes, 'and understand my fellow man. But I am made
like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am
different'" (178). Krupat offers Henry David
Thoreau as another example, both because of his similar focus on individual
distinction and because of his acute awareness of the audiences he {28} addressed. "Thoreau's model of proper
speech-in-writing," he says, "images the individual man addressing
other individual men . . . who, while they certainly make up the generalized
categories of 'neighbors,' or 'readers,' or 'writers,' or 'students,' must
finally read as he writes, in the 'first person'" (179).4 This
is different, Krupat says, from the context of an
oral tradition, wherein "speech always assumes a present listener as
opposed to writing, where the audience is absent to the author, the author
absent to the audience" (178).
David Brumble sees
Native American autobiography as a unique opportunity for scholars to see the
vast historical evolution of this literary tradition repeated in microcosmic
form and to contextualizes Native writing against this backdrop.For
him, "there is a sense in which Indian Autobiography can take [scholars]
even farther back in time" than studying the writings left by the Greeks
or the Egyptians. "We may assume that there was oral
autobiographical storytelling among the ancients," he says, "but
such traditions as there may have been are lost to all but inference. On the
other hand, we may read hundreds of oral autobiographical tales taken down
from American Indians" (4).
It takes Brumble only
a few lines to start using "autobiography" instead of his original
term, but I think it important to look more closely than he does at the
contexts and consequences of "oral autobiographical storytelling,"
a different type of rhetorical action from a Westerner's writing of an
autobiography, responding to a very different type of rhetorical situation
than the tradition of Western autobiography outlined earlier -- not the least
in its removal from that very tradition. Many early Native writers did not
read English at all; few, if any, were reading Thoreau to get a sense of what
readers of the form might have expected. Instead, these Native writers had
their own traditions of storytelling, traditional ways of passing knowledge
about great lives and great events on to later generations, their own ways of
telling their own stories to others, and in these ways even the material
conditions of information conveyance were vastly different from the ways of
Western culture:

Traditionally, the autobiographical forms . . . that
existed among Native American peoples . . . were communicated {29} orally . . . and therefore publicly as
well. One did not tell of one's war honors in private, to one's wives or best
friends, but to assembled members of the tribe, an audience that included
eye-witnesses to the events narrated who were duty-bound to object to or deny
any false claims. (Krupat 178)

Although there were certainly instances in which Native Americans did tell
stories of their accomplishment to single members or small groups of their
families or closest friends, the sense of difference Krupat
portrays remains valid: whether a large group or a single listener is
present, there is little similarity between telling a story to a listener
who, whether "duty-bound to . . . deny any false claims" or not,
sees your words, as you speak them, as a direct extension of yourself, and
the writing model Krupat offers, wherein "the
audience is absent to the author, the author absent to the audience"
(178).
Beyond the physical context of the active
telling of a story, but certainly influenced by this context, are other
traditions of Native American storytelling foreign to the Western
autobiographical genre. David Brumble offers
several examples of characteristics native to orally told stories that white
editors felt compelled to alter in adherence to generic expectations. First,
he writes illustratively, "Editors routinely cut repetitious passages,
for example. Repetition grates upon the modern ear. Repetition grates upon
the modern ear. But in many tribes repetition was a rhetorical feature in
oral narrative" (11). Also, he notes, "the editors almost always
order their material chronologically, even though this sometimes distorts the
sense of time implicit in some narratives" (11). And oral
"autobiographical tales were likely to be discreet stories of episodes
in a life, rather than the story of a life"; in an
autobiographical tale recorded faithfully, with little or no editorial
intervention, he finds, "there are very few connections between
narratives" (85, emphasis added). It should be noted, however, that in
saying "few connections," Brumble is
demonstrating the expectations of a scholar well versed in the form of a
particular genre. The fact that he sees "few connections" does not
mean that the narratives he describes are unrelated; it simply means that
their connectivity is not explained in the ways he expects it to be. {30}
The elements in Winnemucca's autobiography are
neither wholly connected, in the ways Western readers might anticipate, nor
wholly disconnected; in the detail devoted to some aspects of her life and
the blanks left in others, the story is both chronological and episodic. For
the literary scholar, this makes the story hard to categorize; for the
cultural scholar, it opens up tempting avenues through which to draw
conclusions about its author. For example, one could say that Winnemucca's
story is episodic because she did not possess a Western sense of time, or
that it appears disconnected because she failed to recognize that
"personal details"such as of the
circumstances of her multiple marriages and her conversion to Christianity
"would be essential in most traditional Western autobiographies"
(McClure 36). Through this line of reasoning, the text's formal deviations
seem to effectively demonstrate a Native understanding of the world.
Not surprisingly, the conclusions that scholars
draw about her life and writing, working backward from these textual
features, lead them to inconsistent portrayals of Winnemucca. In keeping with
his characterization of Native autobiography as a developmental art of
trading oral traditions in for the written forms of Western culture, Brumble calls her work "essentially an oral
performance put down in writing" (71); he supports this view with
Winnemucca's own words from an episode in her narration in which another
Piute, Bannock Jack, asks her to write a message for him because he knows that
she "can talk on paper" (Hopkins 142). Although we would assume
that such writing would mark Winnemucca as standing outside the traditions of
Western culture -- Brumble adds an admonishment
that readers not assume her "at all aware of literary models" (71)
-- modern reception of her work actually leans in the opposite direction: the
reputation Andrew McClure sets out to rebuff in his 1999 article about
Winnemucca is of a writer who is "overly assimilated and sympathetic to
the dominant culture" (29) and "heavily biased by her acculturated
and Christianized viewpoint" (Bataille and
Sands 21). In the work, McClure notes, "readers will find unexpected
Western elements such as romantic sentimentality and a seemingly naïve
acceptance of the ultimately hostile 'white brothers' -- things that simply
do not sound 'Indian'"; rather than being a written {31} record of her public speeches, informed by
her people's oral tradition, to McClure Winnemucca's work is a deliberate
"appropriation of English and its literary forms" used to disrupt
Western notions of "Indianness" from
within the existing frame of an established literary genre (31-32, emphasis
in original).
But how can so much -- and in this case, with
such widely discrepant conclusions -- be "known" about Winnemucca
based on the readings of scholars so far removed from the time and cultural
surroundings of her writing? An illuminative answer is offered by
twentieth-century rhetorician Kenneth Burke. Burke calls form -- what
literary scholars often equate to genre -- "an arousing and fulfillment
of desires." In Counter-Statement he explains: "A work has
form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another
part," and in that anticipation, "to be gratified by the
sequence" of parts that lead to the expected conclusion (qtd. in Coe 182). For readers, notes genre scholar
Richard Coe, these expectations "translate into genre-specific reading
strategies"; and "when a genre is misidentified," these
expectations lead to "misreadings" (183).
In the case of Winnemucca's Life among the Piutes,
as with the case of many other early Native autobiographical writings, the
identification of the work as an autobiography leads to a specific
"arousing of desires," which are not then fulfilled -- at least not
in ways immediately recognizable by literary scholars with a preexisting set
of well-developed expectations. It is the desire for claims of individuality
such as those Krupat finds in Rousseau and Thoreau
that, when left unfulfilled by these writings, leads Brumble
to say that "for all her Indian activism, Winnemucca retained an
essentially tribal sense of self " (71), Krupat
to argue that her "very title proclaims her individual life as
comprehensible foremost in relation to the collective experience of her
tribe" ("Synecdochic" 185), and
McClure to agree that she fits Krupat's
"category of the Native American autobiographer and the 'synecdochic self 'perfectly.""Winnemucca's
autobiography," McClure continues, his desires aroused by generic
expectation, inadequately filled by the work in front of him, and so
satisfied through a logical explanation of the source of this
dissatisfaction, "is the medium through which the reader sees the
consequences of {32} white settlement on
the tribe -- it is a communal statement about the tribe given
through Sarah Winnemucca" (36, emphasis in original).

SYNECDOCHIC SELFHOOD"
AND
GENERIC EXPECTATION

Andrew McClure refers to the "synecdochicself " that is Arnold Krupat's
metaphoric frame for the distinctions he perceives in the conceptions of
selfhood that inform the writing of Native American autobiography.
"Where personal accounts are marked by the individual's sense of herself
predominantly in relation to other distinct individuals," Krupat says, invoking the Western tendency of self-definition,
"one might speak of a metonymic sense of self; [but] where
narration of personal history is more nearly marked by an individual's sense
of himself in relation to collective social units or groupings," as in
his understanding of the precontact practices of
Native Americans, "one might speak of a synecdochicsense of self " ("Synecdochic"
176, emphasis in original). This is a fine distinction; in less precise
dictionaries, "metonymy" and "synecdoche" appear as
synonyms. But where in metonymy an attribute of a thing has come to stand in
terminologically for that thing -- individuality as an attribute of
personhood becomes "individual" as a name for "person" --
in synecdoche the name for a single member of a group of things assumes the
meaning of the entire group. The standard grammatical example is of
"fifty sail" as an expression representing "fifty ships."
Ultimately, the implication is that, in Winnemucca's case, the writing of a
Piute is taken as representative of the habits of mind of all Piutes -- and from there (although these conclusions are
based, of course, on readers' interpretations of many examples of Native
American autobiography, not just on Winnemucca's) to the thought processes of
all Indians. We can see this happening, for example, when Krupat,
in defining his metaphor, says that the synecdochic
model "has relations to the oral techniques of information transmission
typical of Native American culture" ("Synecdochic"
178), instead of Native American cultures; surely they were not --
and are not now -- all the same. {33}
The results of this metaphor are also at play
in McClure's at-times conflicted treatment of Winnemucca as an author: even
while calling her a perfect example of Krupat's
definition, naming her work a "communal statement" (36), and
insisting that "self-definition independent of the larger tribal
identity is alien to Native cultures" such as the one to which
Winnemucca belongs, McClure also describes her as capable of "construct[ing] a dialogic self that can uphold Native identity and
simultaneously adapt to the dominant culture," of "resist[ing] falling into [the] invented identities"
expected by white readers (31-32), and even of "adopt[ing] the Noble Savage guise in order to subvert it"
(45). McClure seems to find in Winnemucca both a synecdochic
representative for her tribe and a convention defying individual with an
"unconcern for self-definition" (36) who can nonetheless define
herself as "dialogic" while both adopting and subverting the
definitions projected onto her self by others.5 The purpose that
these contradictions seem to serve is to enable him to sustain his analysis
of Winnemucca as an individual (which she must be in order to
"author" a Western-style text with any "authority")
actively resisting the status quo (which demands a "tribal" rather
than individual persona). If we were to condense McClure's at times strained
and jumbled reading into a single, somewhat sweeping claim, it might appear
as follows: although her work is not the "self-portrait" an
autobiography ought to be, by "see[ing] the
self in relation to the larger group, her tribe" (McClure 39) and then
acting as their representative in what Brumble
calls "an extended self-vindication . . . an attempt to defend her own
reputation and that of her family and her tribe" (68), Winnemuca is able to show "to the mass of [American]
people . . . the story of her people's trials," "extenuating
nothing and setting down naught in malice" while "comparing justly
. . . the two races" (Mann 2).
The confusion in McClure's reading is
understandable: the work Winnemucca does to present herself and her people in
a positive light is foregrounded throughout her
text, often at the expense of the kind of personal detail the literary genre
autobiography demands. She describes in detail the generous, responsible
nature of the Piutes as a people (see 8-9, 23, 40,
45-49), the high moral standards of women {34}
in her culture, the lengths to which she has gone to protect her own virtue
(see 181-82), the persistence with which she has attempted to promote her
people's good despite constant resistance from the American government, and
the good relations she has established and maintained with government
officials throughout her dealings with them.6 To underscore this
presentation, the book includes as an appendix reprints of twenty pages of
letters from these officials attesting to her good character. Brumble, when confronted with the same confusing wealth
of material, explains this nonstandard textual emphasis culturally, as
evidence not of an individualistic challenge to readers'perceptions
but instead as an unimaginative application of an accepted tribal practice.
Winnemucca's "first education," he explains, "was in a shame
culture rather than a guilt culture," (Brumble
69) and he sees as specifically characteristic of such cultures the use of
narrative explanations to explain one's actions against accusations of
misconduct. (The whites Winnemucca portrays, contrastingly, tend to respond
to such accusations with "dismissals, flat denials, and, especially,
with assertions of authority" [67]). Winnemucca's demonstration of these
narrative features "should not surprise us" because many other
Native autobiographical writings show similar concerns: "Indians of many
tribes," says Brumble, "were answering
their accusers with autobiographical narratives long before the Paiutes came
into contact with the white man" (69). In making a similar gesture,
Winnemucca, rather than defying convention as an individual author, is simply
responding to white prejudice in such a way as befits a synecdochic
representative of her people.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL
WRITING AS
SITUATED RESPONSE

By focusing their analyses on autobiography as a literary genre and on the
ways in which Winnemucca's work reflects or digresses from the genre's formal
demands, both David Brumble and Andrew McClure miss
the opportunity to fully investigate her writing as a rhetorical action
suited to the exigencies of its situation. Instead of seeing the book
primarily as a reaction to a situation and working {35}
to understand the context that brought the work into being, they read her
text chiefly as a testimony to her attempt to reconcile with Western readers
her "Indian habits of mind" (Brumble 54)
and conceptions of "tribal identity" (McClure 32). Autobiographies
like Winnemucca's, those that demonstrate attributes of both Western
autobiography and oral autobiographical storytelling, of both Western and
tribal understandings of the selfhood of the autobiographer, are presumably
what drove Arnold Krupat to argue for the
classification of Indian autobiography as a distinct "genre of
writing" defined by the "original, bicultural, composite
composition" of texts that "are not a traditional form among Native
peoples but the consequence of contact with the white invader-settlers, and
the product of a limited collaboration with them. Both their production and
their function involve complex, cross-cultural issues," he says, and a
"consideration of the language, culture, and history both of Native
Americans and of Euroamericans" is necessary
for the full understanding and appreciation of their literary value
(For Those xi, emphasis in original). And so Krupat
too recognizes the layers of complexity that inform Native American
autobiographical writing, but only as supporting information: from his
literary perspective, understanding context helps us understand the meaning
of the finished text. Viewed rhetorically, however, the text can be seen as
an author's active attempt to make -- and change -- the meaning of the
surrounding context. If we remove the lens of "autobiography" and
simply view Sarah Winnemucca's writing as it presents itself, we can read Brumble's label "autobiographical-historical
self-vindication" (68) not as an indication of Winnemucca's cultural
habits of mind or of a Native tendency toward an idiosyncratic use of the
autobiographical genre but as the beginning of an examination based on
purpose and function -- an attempt to name the action the text
represents instead of explaining why its form is not what it ought to be.
Some of the most productive material Brumble offers for clarifying this murky view of Native
American autobiography is in his study of the work of modern Native American
autobiographer N. Scott Momaday, whom Brumble characterizes as inventing the notion of
"writ[ing] autobiography after the fashion of
an oral {36} storyteller" (166,
emphasis in original) in order to meet the exigencies of his own situation:
to "recall," in writing, "the kinds of stories he himself
heard as a child" in order that his readers be able to "experience
something like his own experience of listening to his mother and father and
his Kiowa relatives telling stories." Momaday
knows the standard form of the literary autobiography, Brumble
explains, and has read extensively from both traditional and contemporary
Western examples. Momaday even teaches a course in
the form at the University
of Arizona, "but
he chooses none of these moderns for his model. In his two published volumes
of autobiography . . . he chose to write autobiography after the fashion of
the nonliterate, oral Indian storytellers" (Brumble 166). In neither of his two published
autobiographies, Brumble notes, "do we find
continuous, chronologically ordered narrative,"but
instead his writing is episodic, "staccato-like," presenting
"one brief story after another," connected perhaps by theme or
threads of association. His autobiographical work is also without literary
allusion, something that figures prominently in his other writing but would
not have characterized the oral forms he remembered from childhood and sought
to reproduce (166-67). Brumble takes care to
show that the correlation between Momaday's
attempts to create such a form and the older works of Native writers is
incidental rather than deliberate. Describing the recorded autobiography of Two
Leggings as an excellent example of the "preliterate sense of
'autobiography,'" Brumble says that Two
Leggings is "not telling the story of his life, but rather the
stories of his life" (37) in a style very similar to Momaday's
storytelling; however, Brumble insists, it was only
after developing his approach that Momaday
read Two Leggings and other Native autobiographies. "The
autobiographical narratives of Black Hawk, Geronimo, White Bull, Crows Heart,
and Maxidiwiac had helped me to understand Momaday," Brumble
explains, "but not at all because Momaday had
read their narratives; rather, all of them had been participants in closely
related oral traditions" (17). Brumble's approach to
autobiography as a literary form guides his connecting of the textual
commonalities between Momaday's work and the
writings of the early autobiographers, and while Brumble{37} stops short of calling for the
placement of Indian autobiography in a distinct genre, as Krupat
does, Momaday is more than willing to argue for
such a distinction. For Momaday, however,"the quintessential difference between
'Indian autobiography' and modern, Western autobiography" is not formal
but ideological: in his own reference to Two Leggings, Momaday says that where Western autobiography presents
"the story as dead matter" with "an ending somewhere in the
past," Indian autobiography tells "a story that is being carried
on" (Brumble 173).7
In an essay entitled "The Morality of
Indian Hating," written in the 1960s, when he was a graduate student, N.
Scott Momaday takes what could be, but for its
placement in time, a direct shot at Krupat's 1991
conception of the Native American "synecdochic
self":

The Indian has been for a long time generalized in the
imagination of the white man. Denied the acknowledgement of individuality and
change, he has been made to become in theory what he could not become in
fact, a synthesis of himself. This is not semantic trickery. The Navajo, to
illustrate, is an American Indian, but 'the American Indian' is not
conversely a Navajo; he is rather, to the public mind, that lonely specter
who stood for two hundred years in the way of civilization, who was removed
time and again by force, and who was given in defeat that compensation we
call savage nobility, after the example of Rousseau. (58)8

This Western habit of viewing Native Americans as synecdoches,
although Momaday doesn't use the word, is to him
both reductive and demeaning, acting at once to deny Native Americans their
individual selfhood and to freeze them at a place in time where, being both
tribal and "savage," they are permanently foreigners to Western
traditions just as they are impediments to "civilization."9 From
such a critique it is no wonder that, well-read or not, he does not choose to
write in the tradition represented to Krupat by the
same Rousseau Native Americans have to thank for the "noble savage"
image they have fought since long before Winnemucca adopted and subverted it
in 1883. {38}
For Momaday, Native
American identity is not a product of seeing oneself "only in functional
relation to the tribe" (Krupat, "Synecdochic" 185).10 Instead, it is a
matter of combining and recognizing the correlations between "myth,
tribal, and personal history -- [or] 'the mythical, the historical, and the
immediate,' in Momaday's phrase" (Brumble 168), and it is through this conception of
identity that Momaday represents the oral
traditions of his people in his autobiographical writing. "Each
section" of The Way to Rainy Mountain, Brumble
observes succinctly, "is three pages long and consists of three related
accounts, one from Kiowa myth or folklore, one from Kiowa recorded history,
and one from Momaday's personal or family
history" (166). Brumble finds other evidence
of this tripartite influence in such Native American autobiographical works
as Black Elk Speaks, Dan Kennedy's Recollections of an
Assiniboine Chief, James Paytiamo'sFlaming
Arrow's People, Don Talayesva'sSun Chief,
Alma Greene's Forbidden Voice, and Joseph Mathews'sTalking to the Moon, which example he finds especially
"remarkable . . . since [Mathews] clearly has Thoreau's Walden as
his primary model" (168-70). And McClure connects this pattern to Winnemucca,
reminding us that her frequent characterization of whites as "brothers
and sisters of the Paiutes comes from a tribal story" (47).
In some of these examples, traces of one or
more aspects of the "mythical, historical, and the immediate" are much
harder to find than in the deliberately constructed formal organization of The
Way to RainyMountain. Nonetheless, it is the
very inclusion of these features, the connectivity between the narrator's
individual life and the tribal history and mythology that inform that life,
when found in a genre whose readers' desires are aroused in expectation of an
entirely different form of fulfillment -- what Krupat
calls the "who-I-am" instead of the "who-we-are" ("Synecdochic" 175) -- that allows Brumble
to make the following summary, particularly in reference to early as-told-to
autobiographies but relevant also to more general trends in scholarship
concerning Native American autobiography:

That early Indians should tell about their own lives only
after telling the history of their people has suggested to several {39} scholars something essential about Indian
habits of mind. It seems to confirm that these early Indians conceived of
themselves as tribal beings, that it was unconventional for them to think
about themselves apart from their people. (54)11

Brumble's summary seems to suggest that the
inclusion of myth and tribal history in the personal story genre of the
autobiography is an unavoidable result of the habits of mind of these early
writers rather than the conscious layering of several different, correlative,
and interdependent aspects of the writers' identities. But the deliberate
arrangement of these features executed by Momaday
belies this assumption; his construction is, while perhaps more consciously than
for these other writers, like theirs, a particular rhetorical action designed
to fit the varied attributes of the rhetorical situation that inspired it: it
tells the story (or stories) of his life, it reflects the oral traditions of
his childhood, and it represents his conception of identity. The shape this
action assumes on paper, however, bears at times little resemblance to the
traditional Western literary genre of the autobiography. In fact, Momaday's triad is startlingly evocative of the triad
essayist Aldous Huxley uses to describe essayistic
writing:

Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme
variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of
reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there
is the pole of the objective, the factual, the
concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. (v)

To connect Huxley's "personal" to Momaday's
"immediate," his "factual" to Momaday's
"historical," and his "abstract-universal" to Momaday's "mythical" may be to create an
imperfect set of direct correlations but still shows such dramatic similarity
that, if assigning the autobiographical works of Native Americans to a
"literary species" is a worthy goal, considering the essay as a
potential for that "species" is a must.

{40}

NATIVE AMERICAN
WRITERS AND THE
ART OF THE PERSONAL ESSAY

In the introduction to his 1994 The Art of the Personal Essay: An
Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Philip Lopate defines the genre, a "subset of the informal
essay" (xxiv), as follows: "the hallmark of the personal essay is
its intimacy . . . confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through
sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal
essayist sets up a relationship with the reader" based on the "core
. . . supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience"
(xxiii). Lopate then explains the absence of Native
American voices in the anthology in a way that should, by now, sound
dishearteningly familiar: "In many countries and cultures," he
says, "the 'I'" characteristic of such writing forms as the
personal essay "has been downplayed . . . because of communal factors
(Native Americans have viewed the tribe, not the self, as the key unit of
identity)" (lii). In Aldous
Huxley's model, as in Lopate's assumptions, a
personal essay foregrounds the personal with relation to (but while also
including) the factual and the universal; other types of essays would
similarly foreground other aspects instead and include with lesser emphasis
this personal "intimacy." Both models make a distinction that Momaday does not; they name one element of the three he
considers necessary components of identity as more necessary, or
more germane to a particular form of expression, than the others. Even if Lopate had read Momaday, if his
only criterion for the essays he presents were the prominence of the personal
(although this prominence is not equally apparent in all of his anthologized
examples), he could still have made his exclusionary justification by
characterizing Native Americans as viewing the tribe alongside the
self as key units of identity. But Lopate's
introduction, some thirty pages long, includes many descriptions of the
"art" of the personal essay that, apparently without his awareness,
suit Native American autobiographical writings very well indeed.
Some of the features Lopate
mentions as characteristic of the personal essay are formal; others are
better described as rhetorical actions essayists take. A "formal
technique" he identifies as "employed {41}
by the personal essayist is the movement from individual to universal"
(xl). Such movement is exemplified in Momaday's
shift between related accounts in each section of The Way to Rainy
Mountain, and in Winnemucca's progression from a firsthand description
of an undeserved whipping her brother received at her uncle's hand to her
next statement: "Brave deeds don't always get rewarded in this
world" (72-73).
The interweaving of personal experience with
tribal history demonstrated by Momaday and
Winnemucca, among others, comes to mind when Lopate
calls exemplary essayists "fine sifter[s] of the past," who, like
Irish essayist Hubert Butler, emphasize the importance of "local
history" to contextualize the "tiny snail track" of the
writer's own experience (xxxvi), or who carefully select worldly events
external to the writer's community to contextualize his or her responses to
immediate circumstances. And where traditional autobiography begins with a
narrator's birth and marches on in linear, chronological progression toward
the "now" of the writing act (which happens, presumably, not too
far from the "end" of death, since if the comprehensive "story
of a life" is to be told, one must assume that its conclusion is at
hand), the essay, according to Theodor Adorno
"does not begin with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to discuss; it
says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself complete" (qtd. in Lopate xliii).
Paraphrasing Michel de Montaigne, who is held
by some to be the "father" of essay writing as we know it, Lopate elsewhere expresses this focus and its resultant
versatility, this ability for essay writing to be at once localized and
universal: "The essay is a notoriously flexible and adaptable form. It
possesses the freedom to move anywhere, in all directions. It acts as if all
objects were equally near the center and as if all subjects are linked to
each other" (xxxvii). In these characterizations also, the essay as Lopate characterizes it strongly resembles Momaday'sThe Way to Rainy Mountain and such
autobiographical passages in The Man Made of Words as "When the
Stars Fell" and "The Indian Dog" (Momaday
170-73) -- or perhaps it is these writings of Momaday's
that resemble the essay. In fact, it is hard to think of a writer in any
genre who is more aptly depicted than Momaday{42} by the following description: "The
essayist attempts to surround . . . something . . . by coming at it from all
angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral
actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter. . . . The essayist must
be a good storyteller" (Lopate xxxviii).12
And it is not only Momaday
whose autobiographical writing appears essayistic from this perspective.
Comparing Winnemucca's writing to Lopate's original
definition of the personal essay, we can find within her work, without
difficulty, examples of all of the forms of intimacy he demands: she offers
gossip ("It only cost one dollar a plate for beans baked in Boston"
[170]); wisdom ("Be kind to both good and bad, for you don't know your
own heart" [51]); thoughts ("If women could go into your Congress I
think justice would soon be done to the Indians" [53]); memories
("There was another occasion when my brother saved the life of his
friend . . . but as I do not remember all the particulars I will not attempt
to relate it" [73]); desires ("But my heart ached for the women and
children, for there was no clothing for them" [201]); complaints
("this I told to the General, but he would not believe it" [175]);
and whimsies ("Sometimes I laugh when I think of this battle. It was
very exciting in one way, and the soldiers made a splendid chase, and deserved
credit for it; but where was the killing?" [177]). The work also sets up
not one but several different relationships with her readers at different
points in the narration; "Dear reader," she says at one point,
"I must tell a little more about my poor people . . ." (89);
"Oh, for shame!" she rebukes readers "educated by a Christian
government in the art of war" at another (207); "Ah, my dear
friends," she begins in a third (243). And such apparent discrepancies
in her presentation as the contrast between her crying "shame"
against Christian education in one context and calling the Piutes' conceptions of God "just like those of
Jesus" (51) in another, while jarring to scholars of the literary
autobiography, are expected characteristics of the more exploratory form: essaiin Old French was
"trial"; exagiumin
late Latin was "weighing" or "balance."13 As
Georg Lukacs wrote, "The essay is a judgment,
but the essential, the value-determining thing about it is not the verdict .
. . but the process of judging" (qtd. in {43}Lopate xxxi), and
Winnemucca's writing shows her in "the process of judging," among
other things, her immediate surroundings and her people's legends, the
individual characters of both Piutes and whites,
the virtue shown by Christians and non-Christians, the behavior of military
personnel and governmental officials, the policies and promises enacted or
ignored by those who made them, her own actions, and her people's
governmental, matrimonial, and child-rearing traditions.
In fact, instead of meeting the rhetorical
exigencies of one situation -- one that calls, perhaps, for a traditional
autobiography or a personal essay -- Winnemucca's work meets an array of
exigencies. As Brumble has observed, it is an act
of vindication against accusations that had been levied against herself and
her tribe. It is also both "her story" (Mann 4) and "the story
of her people's trials" (Mann 2). It is an adventure tale of war and
banditry, of cross-country chases, rescuers wearing disguises, and lost
babies being miraculously returned to their mothers. It is a painfully
detailed description of the political negotiations involved in the Piutes' fight to even survive the governmental
"assistance" enforced by the institution of the reservation system
and then to return to even a fraction of their native lands. It is a
testimonial explication of the "old ways" of the Piute people,
shown in deliberate contrast with the "new ways" of white society.
And it is the story of an optimistic myth worn down by a harsh reality -- it
is at once personal and immediate, factual and historical, mythical and
universal.

RHETORICAL
GENRE AND BOUNDARY
(OR "FRONTIER") RHETORICS

The comparisons mentioned earlier are not meant to argue for the
reclassifications of the literary works of Native American autobiographers as
personal essays instead but are intended to show that such a classification
would, in many ways, be just as valid as calling them
"autobiographies" after the Western tradition. From the perspective
of the designation of literary genres, the autobiographical writing of Native
Americans fits perfectly into neither category; widely varied {44} itself, "autobiographical
storytelling," (to broaden Brumble's term to
include both directly written and as-told-to examples), is like and unlike
the Western autobiography, like and unlike the essay (personal or otherwise),
like and unlike the purely oral traditions that precede it. On a map
assigning territories to different generic forms, autobiographical
storytelling would hover at the borders of several lands.
Such geopolitical metaphors are common to
academic disciplines like English (the modern dispenser of generic
classifications). Genre theorist Debra Journet
mentions "turf," "boundary," and "property"
alongside "borders" as examples of terms used to divide the academy
into disciplines, and disciplinary material into types and categories such as
genres. To Journet, these metaphors -- and active
strategies for challenging them -- are key to
understanding and working productively within the generic expectations of
academic writing, especially in instances such as a collaborative project
between scholars in different disciplines charged with producing a single
text somehow representative of their separate traditions. The standard, if
unsatisfactory, approach to such situational demands, she notes, involves
attempting to "recast the values and assumptions of each discipline into
the discursive forms of the other" (57); the text that results from such
attempts, she notes, often succeeds at meeting the demands of neither
discipline. Appearing as a distorted version of one or both disciplines'
generic expectations for such projects, the resulting text thus leaves the
desires of readers from both disciplines unfulfilled. What is needed in such
situations, says Journet, rather than awkward
attempts to clothe material in a generic form that does not fit, is the
creation of genuinely new generic forms suitable to the rhetorical demands of
the interdisciplinary situation. These forms she calls "boundary rhetorics," and says of their potential that they
can "do more than renegotiate the borders between disciplinary genres;
they open up new territories to explore" (65).14
When Journet compares
interdisciplinary work to "becoming acculturated to the 'strange
land[s]'" of other genres, and associates with generic groupings
"the idea of shared language and customs" (57), she is, to a
degree, still being metaphorical. When Krupat{45} describes "Indian Autobiography as a
ground on which two cultures meet" (For Those 33), he is not.
Because the writing produced by Native autobiographers is always "a
post-contact phenomenon" (Krupat, "Synecdochic" 179), there is a very real sense in
which this writing always represents "the textual equivalent of the
frontier" (Krupat, For Those 33).
There is a difference, of course, between the "boundary" dividing
one disciplinary genre from another and the cultural "frontier" of
competing voices and traditions that characterize Native American
autobiographical writing, but there is also an important similarity that
transcends the convenient overlap of these geographical metaphors: in both
cases writers -- working together or alone -- are confronted with rhetorical
exigencies that their existing repertoire of rhetorical strategies cannot
meet. To take the desired action in each scenario, the writer -- or writers
-- must step outside the "borders" of familiar forms,
"exploring . . . new territories" by creating new genres. Although
born in a different context and to a different set of new exigencies than the
one for which Journet intended the term to be used,
the autobiographical works produced by many Native Americans were -- and are
-- the very kinds of new forms she hoped to see. They do not simply wrap
Native ideas -- or "tribal identities" -- in the packages of
traditional Western forms; nor do they convey purely oral forms in the
different medium of writing. Instead, they combine elements of personal
narrative, Western autobiography, essayistic exploration, and oral
storytelling to meet these new situations the only way they can be met --
with "boundary rhetorics." Native
American autobiographical storytelling is not Western autobiography. It is
not the personal essay. It is not a story told aloud to "assembled members of a tribe." It is not "the
story of [a] life, but rather the stories of [a] life." To view
it as belonging to any of these established genres -- especially with the
intent of critiquing the ways in which it fails to meet the preexisting
expectations of an already codified form -- does these works and their
authors a profound injustice.
What is important is not the term used to
describe Native American autobiographical storytelling but the recognition of
the fact that the generic designations we give pieces of writing do more {46} than group them according to shared
features into categories for study; genres "signal a discourse
community's norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology" (Berkenkotter and Huckin 478).15
Identifying a piece of writing as belonging to one or another genre
does not label only the form of the writing but also the act of
writing -- the "social action," in Carolyn Miller's terms, that
serves a social purpose for the writer and has an effect on the writer's
society (or societies). Calling a text an "autobiography" arouses
in readers more desires -- more expectations -- than the preconceived set of
textual features an autobiography is assumed to include.
"Autobiography," a Western term for a traditional Western art form,
carries in addition to "norms" for the telling of the Western
"life story" an association with Western epistemological,
ideological, and ontological preferences -- such as the understandings of
identity and individuality that predominate in Western culture. "The
question of the unity of the self and its relation to the text . . . [is] not
just . . . an interpretive issue (whether we can ascribe a voice or
intention) but . . . a political and cultural one, in so far as it involves
memory and Indian traditional values and forms of expression," explains
David Murray, in the "Autobiography and Authorship" chapter of his Forked
Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts.
And the Western "concept of an individual life" as a linearly
"unfolding story which can be isolated, recalled and retold" in its
entirety, and made into a single, distinct "product for contemplation,
is not one necessarily shared by other cultures" (65).
In the postscript at the end of his study,
David Brumble illustrates his still-developing
awareness of the cultural assumptions that studying Native autobiographical
writing as Western autobiography imposes on these texts. Noting the benefit
that can be gained by relinquishing some of our generic expectations and
listening, instead, to what is -- and is not -- told by these storytellers,
he says:

If a Sioux warrior tells about his life by describing his
deeds, if he tells us nothing about how his personality developed, I hope
that we can now recognize that, still, he is telling us something
essential about his personality, that we are being
allowed a glimpse of the way this man sees himself. . . . If [Native auto-{47}biographer] Maxidiwac
makes nothing explicit about just how it is that she came to be the person
she is . . . [but tells of many other things,] We should realize that in all
her talk of fields and plants and her deeds, we may catch a glimpse of a self
very different from our own. We should recognize that [the Native Americans
whose autobiographical writing we study] are by their silences providing us
with "true evidence of their personality" -- precisely by telling
us nothing about their personality. (181-82)

While I hope that the dangers of extrapolating overmuch upon the ways in
which the "self " Western readers "glimpse" through such
readings might be "very different from [their] own" have been
adequately outlined, the importance of these glimpses, and of the work
scholars must do in order to see these "selves" as they present
themselves, to look at what is written or not written instead of
what is expected and presumed missing, cannot be overstated. The
"silences" of Native writers are -- like their personal narratives,
tribal histories, mythologies, "self-vindications," and
autobiographical stories -- rhetorical actions that can only be fully
understood in relation to the socially, culturally, politically,
epistemologically, and ideologically influenced rhetorical circumstances
surrounding them: rhetorical circumstances that were not, and will never be,
identical to the rhetorical circumstances prompting Western writers to create
the works whose recurrent forms qualify them for inclusion in the literary
genre autobiography. An unexamined grouping of Native autobiographical
writing under this -- or any -- generic heading only serves to obscure those
influential circumstances in ways that impair our ability to understand these
works as what they are.
At the very end of his postscript, Brumble begins to propose just such an examination:
"Perhaps,"
he says, "we should return .. .to the problem of defining autobiography" in ways
other than in the "confining . . . generic definitions"
characteristic of current scholarship. When "read without a
culture-bound insistence that the autobiographer speak to us as would Henry
Adams or Rousseau," he says, "the hundreds of Indian
autobiographers -- speaking to us from three {48}
centuries, from well over a hundred different tribes -- can show us an
immense range of human ground" (182-83). Brumble
leaves the details of how, exactly, one should read Indian
autobiography up to other scholars and his readership, perhaps hoping for
someone else to codify the appropriate generic classification for these
bicultural documents.
My answer is this: rather than focusing on the
nature of the literary work, to truly understand these texts, we
must focus on the nature of the work accomplished by the act of
creating the literature. To approach genre as a textual result of
purposeful rhetorical action rather than as a tool for literary definition is
to open up an avenue into this "immense range of human ground," a
way to explore the new generic "territories" created by Native
American autobiographical storytelling -- an active rhetorical response to
rhetorical circumstances unlike any others in the world.

NOTES

1. Amy Devitt elaborates: "Since genres are defined by such
similarity and difference, texts must not only always participate in a genre
but always participate in multiple genres simultaneously. Thus, texts need
not be categorized singularly, as either tragedy or comedy, for example, or
simply, as 'genre writing,' such as mysteries, romances, science fiction, and
westerns. . . . Texts are generic in multiple and complex ways"
(700-701). This elaboration is part of her attempt to reconcile current work
in literary and rhetorical genre studies and probably reflects views that
neither David Brumble nor Arnold Krupat were working within the understanding of literary
genre that influenced their writing about autobiographies in the 1980s.
2. Life among the Piutes:
Their Wrongs and Claims was published under the author's married name,
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins; perhaps because this marriage was short-lived and
perceived as not appropriately characteristic of the author's life, modern
scholars often refer to her simply as Sarah Winnemucca. I have chosen to
follow that trend. In-text citations, however, are to "Hopkins" so as to correlate with Works
Cited entries.
3. Modern spelling conventions allow both
"Paiute" and "Piute"; I have kept Winnemucca's spelling
in my own prose for the sake of simplicity and consistency with quotations
from her text; where other writers use the "a," I have retained
their spelling. {49}
4. Krupat adds,
parenthetically, addressing Thoreau's gender-specificity, that "there
remains the problem of what women were to do with these constructions"
but offers no further comment or solution.
5. In portraying her as "dialogic,"
McClure means that Winnemucca is in dialogue with different aspects of
herself; the material reality of the dialogues that took place between
Winnemucca and Mann that presumably helped construct the work here go
unmentioned.
6. These last two themes appear in detail
throughout Hopkins's
final two chapters, "The Bannock Wars" and "The Yakima
Affair."
7. Brumble's in-text
citation notes as the source for this quote a 1985 interview with Momaday, but no such interview appears in his
bibliography.
8. "The Morality of Indian Haters"
appears anachronistically in Momaday's 1997 The
Man Made of Words but has reputedly been published unchanged from its
original composition.
9. Interestingly, Krupat,
in the same 1991 article, after disclaiming the notion that his metaphor
should imply that "all autobiographies of Indians must necessarily be
unimpressed by varieties of individualism, [or] that all autobiographies by
Native people must take synecdoche as their defining figure," mentions Momaday as an example of a Native writer using a more metonymic
model. "Synecdochic" 186.
10. This comment is made in particular
reference to Leslie Silko's Storyteller, whom Krupat says "conceives of individual identity only
in functional relation to the tribe." "Synecdochic"
185. Although elsewhere in the article he speaks of Native and Western
conceptions of identity as being equally valuable despite their difference, Krupat's use of the word "only" here seems to
imply that such a conception is somehow lacking in relation to Western
individualism.
11. In Brumble's
original context, this statement is qualified by his acknowledgement of its
limitations: the problem with this deduction, he says, is that it is made on
the basis of only the as-told-to autobiographies, the contents and certainly
arrangement of which were not necessarily selected by the narrators, and so
might not reflect the actual intentions of these narrators. While this is a
valid objection, he makes other statements throughout the text that imply
that the impression held by these scholars to whom he refers is an accurate
portrayal of a point of view with which he agrees at least in principle, if
not in its more derogatory implications. See Brumble
46, 176.
12. Momaday on
writing, creating a depiction with which Lopate
would have found familiarity: "What we have in all writing and in all
prehistoric rock art . . . is a common denominator that is truly definitive:
the element of story. Man is a storyteller" (130). {50}
13. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology,
ed. C. T. Onions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).
14. The question of whether such a new genre,
once created, would then become subject to the same limitations as the old
genres it was designed to replace or would remain open to continual revision
remains contested in genre studies at this time; some scholars, such as Gunther Kress (see his essay "Genre in a Social
Theory of Language") argue that genres are never stabilized but are
always in the process of adapting to better serve situational demands.
Others, such as Carolyn Matelene (see Worlds of
Writing) are, like Journet, concerned about
the interaction between changing needs in school and workplace writing
situations and the "outmoded prescriptions" of instruction in and
repetition of existing forms no longer suitable to new situations yet
stubbornly resistant to change.
15. The rhetorical term "discourse
community" can be used in relation to communities defined very broadly,
as with a group of several nations sharing a common language, or extremely
narrowly, as with a group of people with nearly identical and identically
contextualized understandings of a specific set of terms, such as the workers
sharing a single project in a particular microbiology lab. Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas Huckin employ
the term in the context of academic disciplinarity,
using it to frame similar observations about disciplinary genres as those
Debra Journet and other genre scholars make. By
including it in this argument, I hope to expand their meaning beyond the boundaries
of academic disciplinary genres and into the genres of communication in
general, where a discourse community can be any group with a shared
understanding of a set of textual or linguistic features or attributes -- in
this case, the common features and associations accompanying the Western
notion of autobiography.

WORKS CITED

Bataille,
Gretchen, and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their
Lives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1984.

Brumble,
H. David, III. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley:
University of
California Press, 1988.

Coe, Richard. "'An Arousing and Fulfillment of Desires': The
Rhetoric of Genre in the Process Era -- and Beyond." Genre and the
New Rhetoric. Ed. Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway. London:
Taylor, 1994.
181-90.

Kress, Gunther. "Genre in a Social
Theory of Language: A Reply to John Dixon." The Place of Genre in
Learning: Current Debates. Ed. Ian Reid. Melbourne:
DeakinUniversity Centre for
Studies in Literacy Education, 1987. 37-45.

Krupat,
Arnold. For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American
Autobiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

------. "Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self." American Autobiography:
Retrospect and Prospect. Ed. Paul John. Madison:
University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991. 171-94.

Lopate,
Philip. Introduction. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from
the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Lopate. New York: Anchor
Books, 1994. xxiii-liv.

Mann, Mary. Preface. Life among the Piutes:
Their Rights and Claims. By Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. Reno:
University of
Nevada Press, 1994.

Approaching
a Sacred SongToward a Respectful Presentation of the
Discourse We Study

ANDIE DIANE PALMER

Educators who focus on American Indian or First Nations languages often
have the privilege of bringing tape recordings of songs and stories to their
students in the classroom. Learning the protocols for such sharing of the
treasured gifts of ancestors is made easier by the good examples of our
teachers in and out of the classroom, who share such gifts as part of their
own teaching. I use this essay to make explicit some teaching practices that
go without saying, as they are modeled by Upper Skagit Elder, university
professor, and storyteller Vi taqwәblu Hilbert. This
essay is a reflection, written back to my own teacher, about what I have
learned and continue to learn in her presence. It is written in response to
the wish of one of my own students that such good examples could be more
widely shared and consciously articulated in the literature on educational
practice.
Many of us who teach in the area of First
Nations or American Indian languages and traditions have been given
permission to share taped recordings of privately owned songs and stories,
photographs, and videos with our students in the classroom. In informal
discussion, some educators speaking at the 2000 Canadian Indigenous and
Native Studies Association conference expressed their trepidation regarding
the classroom presentation of such materials from their own areas of
expertise, even when explicit permissions had been given to them by the
creators or performers of the materials.1 The classroom presents a
new context in which implicit agreements to respect the materials and act
with honor toward the original pre-{53}senters necessarily require a different enactment of
protocols than a face-to-face encounter with the original presenters.
The classroom situation does not afford the
checks on presentation that are provided in personal interaction with a
singer. In a face-to-face interaction, audience members can often take
explicit direction from the singer with regard to how they might stand, sit,
or otherwise respectfully attend to, and participate in, the event. If
necessary, permissions and explanations can be given by the singer or another
knowledgeable person present. Audience members in face-to-face interaction
with a singer can also assume that the singer can exercise some degree of
autonomy in choosing to give voice to a particular song, or not, when in
their midst. Within the classroom, where the song is audited from a tape
recording, the expectations of a song's owners or performers might not be as
clear. Cultural conventions ordinarily associated with classroom learning may
not be in accord with those of song presentation. Note-taking, for example,
might ordinarily be seen as a reasonable display of attentiveness for a
student in a classroom setting, whereas taking notes while listening to a
singer could imply a lack of engagement.
Some of the inherent difficulties of classroom
presentation have been mitigated where locally developed curricula and
textbooks have been put into place in consultation with teachers and communities
(e.g., the work of Julie Cruikshank with Yukon elders to develop DänDháTs'edenintth'é / Reading Voices: Oral and Written
Interpretations of the Yukon's Past and the body of work developed by
educator David Cort and noted storytellers with his
elementary school students on the Tulalip Reservation). Educational
organizations have also taken steps to provide guidelines for presenting
traditional teachings in a manner that is culturally appropriate. For
example, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks and the
Alaska Native Knowledge Network have developed a set
of standards for presentation, which provide the approved philosophy for
teaching from cultural materials and suggestions for preparation.
Unfortunately, the Alaska Native Knowledge Network guidelines do not provide
specifics for the working out of practice in the classroom, the very learning
environment that they attempt to address. Some ethnographic {54} studies examine communication failures in
the classroom (e.g., Philips), but ethnographic research that explicitly
examines successful practice in the teaching of cultural materials in the
classroom is more difficult to locate. One notable exception to this
generalization can be found in the work of Linda Goulet.
Goulet examined the teaching practices of two
highly regarded teachers of aboriginal students, one working in her Dene home community and the other a nonaboriginal
teacher working in a Northern Cree community. Her research identified
specific effective practices of these teachers and noted particularly how
they were able to teach the students for "responsible
self-direction" (68, quoting Sheila Watt-Cloutier).
Cathy Sewell observed that educators are much
in need of concrete examples of successful practices in university classrooms
(Sewell and Pocklington).2 My aim here
is to make explicit a framework that allows for a respectful approach to song
in the classroom, according to Lushootseed
principles as I have come to understand them, with implications for
presenting song from other traditions as well.3 I suggest that
such practices can be observed and adopted, consciously or not, when one has
the privilege of learning from a good teacher in the classroom. Such
practices often seem to "go without saying," but a record of them
can inform and enrich the teaching practices of others not directly exposed
to them. I further propose that exposure to such successful practices allows
for an improved understanding of the meanings of the songs as extended into
such contexts, as well as a better understanding of the discomfort many have
expressed when they find that cultural materials are improperly aired or
displayed.
Vi taqwәbluHilbert, has sometimes shared the songs of her relatives,
recorded on tape, in the Lushootseed literature and
language classes at the University
of Washington. She has
done so in such a way that I have felt more at ease in sharing those recorded
songs, when permitted, as well. I will begin by describing the directly
observable (external) components of her practice. Here, insofar as I am
capable of describing it, is what Hilbert modeled for us:

She let us know that before she ever played
a song for us, she thought over why we might need to hear it.{55}
She always prepared the way and put us in a
ready frame of mind to listen. She would tell us that we were going to hear a
song and that the song was a gift, a treasure. She would describe her
familial relationship to the singer and tell us a little about what she
appreciated about the person.
She would then describe the purposive action of
the person who had recorded the song -- who it was recorded with, who the
person stated he or she had recorded it for, what the stated purpose of the
song was.
She would tell us how thankful she was that
someone had thought it important to record the song.
She would express gratitude that this person
had recorded the song so that we could hear it.
She would discuss restrictions that might have
been placed on the recording or auditing of the song and explain why we were
currently able to hear the song and the decision that had to be carefully
made by the singer to record it.
She would introduce the singer as someone
present, including, where warranted, directly addressing him or her as a
relation.
When she turned the tape recorder on, she would
listen, standing quietly and attentively.
When the song was over, she would turn the tape
recorder off, pause, and thank the person whose voice we had listened to.

I think we benefit from this special care in presentation in the
classroom. Of such practice Linda Akan writes,

Teaching and learning seem to be inseparable. Although the
roles of teacher and learner may be clearly understood, especially in
face-to-face interaction, they are also internal processes. . . . Ideally,
teaching implies setting an example by being the example and carrying the
message of our Ancestors. (192-93)

Hilbert's role as teacher, modeling a
respectful stance toward song, helped make students aware of their responsibilities
to the singer and his or her work and helped us to listen with our full
attention. She would ensure that everyone was attentive and in a state of readi-{56}ness
to hear the song. By ensuring that we understood that we were listening to a
singer, and to that singer's song, Hilbert promoted a more direct engagement,
and reminded us that songs as performed are communicative acts. They call
forth a connection between singer, hearer, and focus attention on a specific
location in time and space.
Hilbert also provided a template for future
action with her way of presenting. Through presentation, she provided a set
of protocols that allowed me to be in a position to listen, and, when
teaching myself, to prepare my students to listen. The readiness and ease she
fostered allowed those of us in her class to be in a position to listen with mindful purpose. The protocols set up a space of
possibility in which to enter into the discursive action of song. We were in
a position to do so even if we did not understand what we were being exposed
to (and we can continue to learn what this is for all of our lives) because
we knew that we were placed in a position of behaving respectfully by
participation in the protocol. It allowed for the activation of potentials in
discourse that might otherwise not be available if the song were presented as
only a record of a past event.
Implicit in this framework of action is a set
of understandings about what the song, and hearing the song, can mean. As Akan has said of her own Saulteaux
teacher and grandfather, Alfred Manitopeyes,
Hilbert is "setting an example by being the example and carrying the
message of our Ancestors" (192-93). Hilbert sets the example by
"being the example" when she greets the one who sings on the tape.
Sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, the living audience is directed
to understand that the song performance invites the presence of the ancestors
to whom it is sung, and by whom it is sung.
Bruce-subiyayMiller writes that there is a silence in greeting, that "allow[s] the ancestors to visit" (25). Here, in the
preparation, and in Hilbert's attentive listening, we find that silent space
of acknowledgment before the spoken greeting and thanksgiving. The thanks
acknowledge interlocutors in the room who may have been called back by the
song. Miller reminds us that interlocutors may not be physically present; mindful speech and song can acknowledge and entreat those
who have passed and can also engage those yet to be born. I would suggest that
the point in time that the song is sung {57}
(and is sometimes tape-recorded) is only one part of the temporal frame that
the singer takes into account; how those songs might be apprehended in other
times, reaching forward and back from the point of performance, can also be
acknowledged.
The song as performed must also be explicated
with regard to the situated meaning for the singer and the appropriateness of
its airing in a particular geographic location at a particular point in
history. By way of example, I consider here the performance of lehelsongs. Lehel,
also known as slahal, slehel,
and lahalin several Salish
languages, as well as "bone game" and "stick game" in
English, is a gambling game played by two teams, the object of which is to
guess which hand of one of the players holds a marked bone. In Coast Salish
territory, lehel games are held in conjunction with
canoe races and other spring and summer gatherings. Miller notes that in his
Skokomish (Coast Salish) tradition, the season associated with the beginning
of lehel playing is "in May, when the
salmonberries bloom" (34). The games are played on the coast with
serious attention to winning but are also joyous affairs associated with
celebration. Songs are sung by members of the side holding the bones as part
of their efforts to overpower or distract the opposing players' attention
from the true location of the marked bone. Lehel
songs are acknowledged throughout what I know of Salish territory to work, in
part, as entreaties for spiritual assistance in the game. The power in, or
of, the songs as performed can manifest in unanticipated ways.
In Secwepemc
(Interior Salish) territory in British
Columbia, prescriptions concerning the singing of lehel songs have developed in a very different way than
they have on the West Coast since the 1860s. After learning of the games at
summer gatherings, the Oblate priest Father LeJacq
enforced a prohibition on the singing of Secwepemc
songs, including lehel songs, which he regarded as
instruments that might draw the singers away from his Catholic teachings. He
did permit the singing of lehel songs at funeral
wakes, however. Under his gaze, singers of lehel
songs ostensibly sang and played "for amusement only," to pass the
nights at wakes throughout the year (compare Whitehead 81-83). In Secwepemc territory at Esk'et (Alkali Lake, BC)
today, the strict prohibitions imposed by the {58}
Oblate priests have relaxed, as has the order's
power to enforce them, but wakes have become the preferred and typical
setting for lehel games and songs. For a person at Esk'et to sing a lehel song,
whether within or outside of the context of a wake, is to activate the
potential for song to call on those who have passed away for assistance in
helping another over to the other side. A child heard singing a lehel song away from a lehel
game, (i.e., for idle purpose) calls some elders at Alkali Lake to an
awareness that someone may soon be dying.4
I would suggest that scholarly inquiry into
local use of song can be best approached with an assumption that all songs
are part of the spiritual "work" of performers and their audiences,
and while that work might be may not be fully understood by the
scholar-as-auditor, the potential for the activation of multiple unfolding
meanings is not extinguished by the physical absence of the performer and
that the potentials called to the fore may shift and will continue to shift
over time. A recent collection of performances and of essays on songs, Spirit
of the First People: Native American Music Traditions of Washington State,
edited by Willie Smith and Esmé Ryan, makes clear
that songs require our careful regard and approach and that they continue to
be part of a living tradition. The authors and singers inform us through their
partially overlapping and supporting commentary that songs may be regarded as
gifts received (SiJohn); as healing (Cunningham and
Amoss); as something other than "music"
or the product of an earthly composer and, simultaneously, as property
(Haines); as prayer; or as instruction to act (Timentwa
and Chamberlain). Songs can strengthen ties on parting (Beavert-Martin)
and can serve as teachings, as greetings, as announcements to let other
persons know who is entering their territory, as welcome, as requests for
aid, as company, as support, and as sacred connection. Their performance can
be seen as connecting us through embodied resonance, as a mutual breathing
together, as a co-creation of a time and space for learning to occur (see
also Lightning).
Given the myriad ways that song can be
activated, implicit in a respectful approach to song is an acknowledgement
that, as part of the expression of language not moribund but living, the song
meaning can change. We can therefore also expect that the concomitant {59} classroom experience of song and the
appropriateness of its performance in that context can, and will, change. A
recorded song or speech and accompanying materials, such as photographs of
associated ceremonial activity, that might be appropriate to present at one
time will not necessarily be so in all seasons and at all times.

Following the good example of a teacher in the performance of a protocol
of presentation that acknowledges the song, its situation, the singer, and
the audience's relationship to the singer entrains the mindful consideration
of the potential of all Lushootseed songs to be
prayerful entreaties and leaves open the potential for change of meaning and
for learning on the part of all auditors. The vessel that carries the songs forward
is thereby enlarged. We can thus assist with the care and packing of this new
and "different canoe" by observing the helpful examples of our
elders.5

NOTES

This article is based on a paper presented
at the Thirty-seventh International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages, Bellingham, Washington.
Conference proceedings appeared in the University of British Columbia
Working Papers in Linguistics 9 (July 2002): 287-92. This article is
dedicated to the memory of Catherine Francis Sewell. A former student and an
educator in the School of Native Studies at the University of Alberta, Cathy
is also fondly remembered as a singer -- a founding member of the aboriginal
vocal group Asani (in Cree, "The Rock").
1. Past experience as students can contribute
to this apprehension. Educators have recounted their own experiences of
discomfort from times when they were students and were presented with such
materials without some acknowledgement or reassurance of permissions granted
to instructors to share the materials.
2. See also the experiences of aboriginal
students in universities as documented through guided reflections in the work
of Jane Vera Martin and of Wayne Gorman.
3. Lushootseed, or dxwleutcid, is the Coast
Salish language spoken in the Puget Sound region of WashingtonState, along the rivers and salt
water between stecas (Olympia)
and dxwlubi (the Lummi
Reserve near Bellingham).{60}
4. I am grateful to Shuswap
language teachers Celina Harry and Julianna Johnson
for their explanations of the meanings of the singing of lehel
songs by children at AlkaliLake. Responsibility
for any misunderstanding of what they have so patiently tried to teach is, of
course, my own.
5. The Lushootseed
word qilbid, often glossed as
"canoe," refers generically to any vehicle or conveyance, including
the automobile, and even the printed page. Hilbert has considered the change
in modes of transferring cultural materials, from face-to-face interaction to
the archive of the spoken word on audio and videotape and in print as a
change in vehicle, as a "different canoe" (254), with all the
concomitant changes in strategies of packing and delivering that are
anticipated or unforeseen.

Hilbert, Vi taqwәblu. "To a Different Canoe: The
Lasting Legacy of Lushootseed Heritage." A
Time of Gathering: Native Heritage in WashingtonState.
Ed. Robin Wright. Seattle: BurkeMuseum
and University
of Washington Press,
1991.

Philips, Susan U. The Invisible Culture: Communication in
Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. New York: Longman,
1983.

Sewell, Catherine, and Sarah Pocklington.
"Get Indiggy with It: An Examination of the
Development of Contemporary Indigenous Music from 1970 to the Present."
Paper presented at the Conference of the Canadian Indigenous and Native
Studies Association, Edmonton,
2000.

SiJohn,
Cliff. "The Circle of Song." Smith and Ryan 45-50.

Smith, Willie, and Esmé Ryan, eds. Spirit
of the First People: Native American Music Traditions of WashingtonState.
Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1999.

Whitehead, Margaret. The Cariboo
Mission: A History of the Oblates. Victoria:
Sono Nis Press, 1981.

{62}

Revising
Strategies
The Intersection of Literature and Activism in
Contemporary Native Women's Writing

LISA J.
UDEL

Literature can and does successfully contribute to the politics of
possession and dispossession. Elizabeth
Cook-Lynn

How are we to read contemporary Native women's written work? If writing
can be considered a form of activism, as I believe, what is the role of the
reader of such works? What do the writers expect of us as readers of and
potential actors in the causes they promote? In exposing the reader to the
violence of Euroamerican expansion and domination
during the last three centuries, Native authors overtly seek to educate the
non-Native reader uninformed of such history while also confirming
experiences known to Native readers. Through examples of contemporary Native
life that include violence, poverty, and broken family units, along with the
lost traditional lifeways of language,
spirituality, and artistry, Native authors expose the reader to ongoing
problems that continue to erode Native nations' ability to survive in modern
America. The reader, often ignorant of such facts, comes away with an
enhanced understanding of the various ways Western colonialism has destroyed,
and continues to destroy, Native cultures.
Concomitantly, what is our response to the
examples of effective grassroots resistance seen in these works: Winona LaDuke's novel Last Standing Woman, her essay
collection All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life,
the tentative affirmation of Elizabeth{63} Cook-Lynn's Aurelia: A Crow Creek
Trilogy, and the spiritual commitment of Linda Hogan's novels Mean
Spirit, Solar Storms, and Power? All of these texts
assert that the beauty of the linked natural and spiritual worlds is all
around us, that Native nations, despite the obstacles posed by Western
cultures, will survive and indeed flourish. Are such examples representations
of genuine conditions among select Native communities, or are they models of
what can be obtained? If Native American literature has its roots in "truthtelling," in "setting the record
straight," as many scholars have argued (see, e.g., Brumble),
then we must ask how much of those initial motivations continue to drive
contemporary Native writers and their readers today. What do contemporary
Native writers demand of their readers who are both Native and non-Native? In
their work, LaDuke, Cook-Lynn, and Hogan profess to
tell truths and expose lies to the reader. The authors' demands on the reader
are reformative; their works model a superior Native reality, with the hope
of producing an educated reader/activist who, upon finishing the text, will
work to improve the lives of contemporary Native Americans.
A chief aim shared by LaDuke,
Cook-Lynn, and Hogan, along with many other Native women writers and
theorists, is the decolonization of North America.
Several Native writers characterize this movement as "Indigenism" and describe it as a liberation movement
and worldview that offers an ideology that integrates life with nature. This philosophy
identifies an indigenous "Fourth" or "Host" world on the
planet that is composed of Native peoples globally; the industrialized and
industrializing states comprise the First, Second, and Third worlds, and are
seen as sitting atop the Host world, subjugating and feeding off it
simultaneously (Guerrero, "Academic Apartheid" 59-61). The concept
of Indigenism presupposes several assumptions: that
indigenous people worldwide share a common experience of colonization and subsumption into a capitalist and hegemonic nation state,
a shared investment in the attainment of sovereign nationhood, and a
fundamentally nondisruptive, integrative
relationship with the natural habitat (Guerrero, "Academic
Apartheid" 61). All three writers produce texts that reflect their
political and artistic ideologies. I wish to consider how their ideologies {64} shape their written work and also to
discuss whether their work fulfills the agendas they articulate and to what
result. Indigenist movements
operate within both the grassroots settings that LaDuke
and Hogan describe and the academic milieu that Cook-Lynn has shaped,
addressing reform at all levels. Regardless of where they devise an Indigenist program, whether within the university academy
or within reservation or urban communities, Native women deploy an ideology
based in ecoculturalism, an identity located in the
linkage between a sense of being with a sense of place (Guerrero,
"Exemplars of Indigenism" 217). Native
intellectuals argue for an academic Indigenism that
would be based upon Native experiences of language, history, culture,
religions, and so on. Intellectual Indigenism would
apply Native knowledge bases to decolonize current Native studies programs
and the Native communities they serve. Grassroots activists employ an ecoculturalist methodology that identifies women's health
and prosperity with a feminized, maternal earth in order to combat the
destruction of natural habitat (ecocide) and a land-based culture
(ethnocide), which they view as inextricably bound. LaDuke, Cook-Lynn,
and Hogan discuss eco-and ethnocide in their novels and essays, addressing
the readers, instructing us how to read their work, why it
is crucial that we know the historical "facts" of the narrative,
and what our next action should be once we have finished reading
their work. LaDuke's historical fiction and the
political articles written over the past twenty years overtly address Native
land reclamation projects, environmental restoration, economic
sustain-ability, and Native sovereignty. As Steven Salatia
observes, LaDuke has become one of the most
recognizable tribal figures in modern America; however, much of her
visibility stems from non-Native media such as The Progressive, off
our backs, and the Utne Reader.
LaDuke's position within Native communities and
within Native studies is more ambiguous.
Although the practical applications of their
reform differ, LaDuke and Cook-Lynn share a desire
to change elements of Native American life, with LaDuke
focusing on the material aspects and Cook-Lynn focusing more on the
intellectual. The subject matter of their work,{65}
both grassroots and academic, their historical and cultural specificity,
coupled with their demands on the reader, determine in part the kind of
presses that publish their work -- Voyageur, South End, University Presses of
Colorado, Wisconsin, and Iowa, respectively -- along with the limited reviews
their work receives in both the non-Native and nonacademic press.
I have included Linda Hogan in this discussion
because she straddles the two blocks that I have identified. Hogan has
produced poetry, fiction, autobiography, and nonfiction prose and has edited
several anthologies of Native women's spiritual and ecocritical
work. Her novels Mean Spirit, Solar Storms, and Power,
along with her essays Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World and
her recent autobiography, The Woman Who Watches over the World, are
published with Simon and Schuster and W. W. Norton. Hogan's work, like that
of LaDuke and Cook-Lynn, focuses on questions of
Indian survival, environment, and identity. Unlike the two other authors,
however, Hogan is published with prominent and commercial houses, accordingly
receives reviews in the mainstream press, especially in recent years, and has
gained wide recognition as an important Native writer.1 Like LaDuke and Cook-Lynn, Hogan depicts crucial, recognizable
moments in history; she traces their origins and examines their results.
Hogan also draws the reader into the world she depicts and speaks directly to
us, informing and advising us of our possible participation in producing
change. Each of Hogan's novels focuses on a different Indian nation: the
Osages in Mean Spirit, the "Beautiful People" of the North
Woods in Solar Storms, and the Taigas of the Florida Everglades in
Power.
I will focus on the latter novel in my discussion.
The three authors represent complementary
elements of Native women's activist writing. Whether exploring the
grassroots, the academic, the artistic, or the spiritual, the authors address
the following themes in their work: Native identity and survival in the
modern world; the role or responsibility of the writer, the intellectual, the
artist, and the tribal member in Native America; how history has determined and
continues to influence tribal politics and indigenous survival; and lastly,
how these issues concern the ongoing struggle {66}
for Native sovereignty. The authors' engagement with these themes shapes the
content and formal structure of their work, often producing prose and poetry
that is politically and artistically ideological in nature.
In Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological
Novel as a Literary Genre, Susan Rubin Suleiman examines the ideological
novel, or roman à thèse,
of the early twentieth century. Suleiman defines ideological novels as texts
with a clear ideological message that seek to persuade their readers of the
"correctness" of interpreting the world (1). The roman à thèse"is a novel written in the realistic mode
(that is, based on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which
signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to
demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious
doctrine" (7).
The novels that I discuss seek to represent an
historical, cultural, and artistic verisimilitude in the hopes of persuading
the reader of the validity or "correctness" of the worldview they
portray. Typically the ideological novel "affirms absolute truths [and]
absolute values" (Suleiman 10). Additionally, an overriding impulse of
the ideological novel is to "make others see" what the author
believes to be true (Suleiman 19). As we consider how LaDuke,
Cook-Lynn, and Hogan address the issues of survival, history, and
responsibility, we must examine our response to the authors' ideologies as
well as the efficacy of their work.

SURVIVAL

The question of Indian survival in contemporary America runs throughout the work
of these three authors. In All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land
and Life, LaDuke details the work occupying
current grassroots Native environmentalist groups. LaDuke
structures All Our Relations in ten chapters, each identifying a
specific tribe and an environmental/political problem, along with the group's
organized efforts to address it. The chapters provide a detailed map of the
area under discussion with Indian place names as well as the Anglo place
names and a narration of historical events leading up to the current crisis
and, in some cases, recent Native victories. LaDuke{67} profiles the Seminoles, the Northern Cheyennes, and the effect of nuclear waste on Western
Shoshone land, as well as her own work with the White Earth Reservation Land
Recovery Project and current use of solar energy among the Hopis, as examples
of political issues confronting contemporary Native Americans. One of the
central concerns of Native survival for LaDuke,
then, is the material conditions of reservation life. She notes that all
reservations are plagued by "ethnostress,"
which LaDuke describes as "what you feel when
you wake up in the morning and you are still Indian, and you still have to
deal with stuff about being Indian -- poverty, racism, death, the government,
and stripmining," the conditions that arise
from being Indian in a country that opposes the political, cultural, and
religious aspects of that identity (90).
One of the primary environmental problems
facing Native groups today is the use of reservation lands as nuclear waste
dumps.2 In addition to the pollution of indigenous land bases, the
expropriation of land and its resources remains another issue of deep concern
to Native groups. Such use of Native lands has obvious repercussions on the
health of its residents as well as their autonomy over cultural, political,
and spiritual matters. LaDuke, like many Native
activists, articulates an ecoculturalist ideology
when she points to a symbiotic relationship between indigenous people and the
environment. They link their systems of cultural organization to a specific
place that contains and imparts memories of their history and identity.
Like LaDuke,
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn questions how Indians are to survive in the modern world,
where Native and Western cultures often collide. Cook-Lynn's scholarly work
covers a wide range of material, including contemporary images of Indians in
popular culture, the function of art in a nationalist agenda, and the effects
of tribal politics upon the individual. While recognizing the importance of
environmental integrity to Native groups, Cook-Lynn approaches the issue of
Indian survival somewhat differently from LaDuke.
Cook-Lynn links Indian survival to the development of intellectual traditions
within the academy as well as to the success of the type of land reclamation
movements that LaDuke describes, noting that
practitioners of Native studies must reevaluate and revise the purposes of {68} their discipline. Until recently, Cook-Lynn
argues, university systems, Native studies departments, and publishing houses
have defined who an Indian is; such a system weakens Native intellectualism
and undermines movements toward Native sovereignty ("Radical
Conscience" 13). Additionally, it privileges white readers' and editors'
tastes over Native expectations which thwarts the
goals of activist writing intent on articulating Native perspectives and
concerns.
Education in the United States has always affected
questions of Indian identity and survival. Given the history of mission and
boarding schools, the majority of Native individuals regard non-Native
educational systems with ambivalence if not open hostility. Whereas schools
have historically been used to assimilate Indians and thwart tribal
sovereignty, Native studies must now work to ensure nationalist movements.
Cook-Lynn calls for a level of self-consciousness among the individual,
noting that within this context, the Native intellectual must ask what it
means to be an Indian in contemporary tribal America. If the individual does
not consider the question of location and purpose, then Native American
intellectualism will cease to exist ("American Indian
Intellectualism" 124). Therefore, the survival of Native America is
linked to the survival of Native intellectual traditions, both inside the
academy and beyond.3 Native scholars involved in such a project
must study their own societies and histories, and the results must provide
the foundation of the discipline. Cook-Lynn proposes that Native studies come
out of and serve the interests of Native communities, linking the academy
with the community.
Linda Hogan's many novels link the survival of
Native individuals to the strength of their ties to Native traditions. Hogan
portrays Native characters poised at crucial moments in their tribes' various
histories. For example, Omishto, the protagonist of
Power, stands at the divide between the white world and the Taiga
world of the Florida Everglades. Omishto, which
means "one who watches," must decide whether she will assimilate
into the mainstream white world, as her Taiga mother has, or live in KiliSwamp with the Taiga
elders of her small tribe. At sixteen, Omishto
faces questions of identity and survival. As she enters womanhood, her
decision will determine {69} the direction
her life takes henceforward. Omishto's realization
that she must choose which world to inhabit stems from the killing of a
panther, a sacred, primordial animal among the Taigas.4 This act
is carried out by Omishto's mentor, Ama, who maintains Taiga traditions and has been destined
to assume leadership within the tribe. Ama's act
has serious repercussions: panthers are protected by the Endangered Species
Act, and killing one is illegal under U.S. law. More important, their
sacred position as creator of the Taiga people demands reciprocity and
protection from the tribe. Ama is tried by the
state of Florida,
where she is acquitted as mentally unsound; she is then tried, found guilty,
and ultimately banished by the Taiga elders.
Hogan maps Omishto's
growing comprehension of her role in Taiga survival. While gratified to have a
place within the community of Taiga elders, Omishto
is also ambivalent about the demands placed upon her, observing: "I know
our survival depends on who I am and who I will become. But this is too large
for me. It makes me want to run away" (161). Omishto
knows the history of white conquest of the Everglades
tribes; on several occasions she relates particular episodes that highlight
the violence of that conquest. She recognizes the complexity of maintaining
Taiga traditions in contemporary America.

RESPONSIBILITY

LaDuke, Cook-Lynn, and Hogan all link Indian
identity and survival to the tribal responsibilities of the individual. LaDuke identifies her responsibilities thus:

I am not a traditional Anishnabe
[sic], I am a product of colonization, a
woman and a warrior. My role, as I see it, is to protect those on the inside
of the circle -- those elders who pray daily in the traditional manner and
language to Mother Earth -- the manner in which she is accustomed to be cared
for, and has been for longer than the Anishnabe can
remember. If anyone can pray to her, it is the elders, and they will teach
the children. I am here to fight for that. ("In Honor of Women
Warriors" 4)

{70}LaDuke successfully employs legal and
organizational strategies of contemporary America to restore Native
American traditions. To that end, her work with the AnishinaabeAkiing and the White Earth Land Recovery Project
exemplifies the goals she lays out. LaDuke devotes
several detailed articles describing the specifics of her activism with both
organizations.5 She wishes to provide a model of successful
grassroots activism to the reader.
Cook-Lynn addresses the question of personal
responsibility through the role of the Indian intellectual and the function
of Native art. As both an intellectual and a poet, Cook-Lynn devises strict,
often prescriptive, guidelines. She envisions the Native studies scholar as
one who must work always with tribal sovereignty in mind. Like the
intellectual, the Indian artist is obligated to create works of art that
propound Indian nationalism. Cook-Lynn characterizes the majority of Native
American poetry as protest or resistance art that works toward liberation and
decolonization movements worldwide. Poetry is deployed to transform the
political and cultural landscape of indigenous peoples. Art must be
functional, insists Cook-Lynn.
In her oft-cited and provocative essay
"The American Indian Fiction Writer: 'Cosmopolitanism,' Nationalism, the
Third World, and First Nation
Sovereignty" and in the more recent "Literary and Political
Questions of Transformation: American Indian Fiction Writers," Cook-Lynn
argues in favor of nationalism to promote Indian sovereignty. Literature that
violates nationalistic modes of fiction, which Cook-Lynn labels
"cosmopolitan," undermines the anticolonial
struggle of literature supporting sovereignty because it reflects the
"tastes and interests of the dominant culture" ("American
Indian Fiction Writer" 28; "Literary and Political Questions"
46). The cosmopolitan writer usually disclaims any tribal responsibility or
nationalistic perspective, thereby calling into question the need for
resistance or decolonization; the cosmopolitan writer is often relegated to
an "outsider position" or, in extreme cases, the "traitor
position" (such as Salman Rushdie
experienced), often marking their work invalid or "inauthentic" in
some circles; and last, cosmopolitanism provides a disincentive for Native
writers to embrace Third World points of view because they fear being labeled
"strident, lack-{71}ing in artfulness, or aesthetically flawed"
("American Indian Fiction Writer" 29). By embracing concepts of
"hybridity," the transcendence of
national affiliations, and the exoticizing of
Native cultures, cosmopolitan writing undermines decolonizing movements while
it also perpetuates aspects of colonialism. Cook-Lynn's critique of
cosmopolitanism echoes similar critiques of postmodernism's fluid form, a
historicity, and reader-response orientation. Like many scholars of color,
Cook-Lynn argues that such critical approaches to literature, as well as the
literature itself, drains the text of historical specificity and
accountability.
In contrast, nationalist literature examines
the meaningfulness of indigenous or tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first
century. What this means for the writer or intellectual is the obligation to
consider representational elements of narration, all in service to a critical
discourse that functions "in the name of 'the people.'" It is a
"matter of principle" for nationalistic literature that the Indian
nation is recognized as the dominant cultural force driving this methodology
("American Indian Fiction Writer" 30).
Like LaDuke,
Cook-Lynn describes American Indian nationhood as characterized by
"tribal bonding with geography," a peoples' spiritual connection to
a specific place that arises from that culture's history and mythology and
recalls the Indigenist definition of ecoculturalism I outlined earlier ("American Indian
Fiction Writer" 31). Native writers who may successfully engage in
nationalistic writing will come from traditional Native backgrounds, or they
will have to reestablish their connection to that heritage. Cook-Lynn's model
for the nationalist Indian writer obviously excludes a great number of
writers whose work is considered legitimate or interesting by critics and
readers alike and poses many problems concerning representation,
authenticity, intent, and voice for Native writers and their audience who
want both political reform as well as aesthetic expression.

HISTORY

A large part of the Native writer's responsibility, observes Cook-Lynn, is
to rewrite the history of America
in relation to its indig-{72}enous
population (Wallace Stegnerix). Revising
Native-Anglo history requires the inclusion of Native perspectives and
narratives that then lead to a reassessment of Eurocentric motivations and
behavior. Cook-Lynn writes, "It may be that Americans will have to come
face to face with the loathsome idea that their invasion of the New World was
never a movement of moral courage at all; rather, it was a pseudoreligious and corrupt socioeconomic movement for
the possession of resources" (Wallace Stegner33). A reexamination of Indian-white history reveals the dichotomies
between the different cultures, raising questions about truth-telling and
voice, as well as hegemony and resistance. This is precisely what LaDuke and Hogan do in their work. For the non-Native
reader, encountering this new perspective can serve as an illuminating
moment, imparting new information, new ways of viewing one's own culture as
well as informed ways of seeing the "Other." For the Native writer,
the act of "setting the record straight" along with its affirmation
for the Native reader becomes a crucial decolonizing act.
In "The Relationship of a Writer to the
Past," Cook-Lynn explores the uses of history in Native scholarship and
art. As an example, Cook-Lynn cites the Sioux Uprising of 1862, where
thirty-eight Dakota Sioux men were hanged in public execution for their
participation. Ordered by Abraham Lincoln, the execution was witnessed by
Dakota women and used as a warning against further Dakota resistance. Several
elements of Cook-Lynn's narrative are important to consider: describing the
executed men as "patriots," she forces the reader to reconsider the
character of the men hanged that day; emphasizing Lincoln's authorship of the
execution forces the reader to reconsider one of America's great heroic
figures as an executioner rather than melancholy liberator; and most
important, Cook-Lynn tells us that her grandmother was one of the young girls
who witnessed the execution. The incident "was forever etched in their
minds and it became one of the private horrors of colonialism,"
Cook-Lynn notes (Wallace Stegner63). For
Cook-Lynn and Native descendants like her, the story must be told in order to
retrieve lost histories and maintain Native identity. The failure to know or
learn such stories has allowed non-Native intellectuals to ignore how history
continues {73} to inform the present story
for Native writers and thinkers. Their different uses and interpretations of
history both determine and stem from the dichotomous worldviews of Native and
non-Native cultures. This approach is particularly evident in Hogan's Mean
Spirit, focusing as it does on the exploitation and murder of several
Osage individuals for their oil holdings.
In her novel, Last Standing Woman,
Winona LaDuke carries out the nationalist,
historical agenda that Cook-Lynn envisions. Covering 156 years of Anishinaabe history, from the arrival and murder of the
first priest in 1800 to the hopeful affirmation of Native survival by the
novel's protagonist in 2018, the novel traces the historical realities that
confront contemporary Anishinaabe decolonizing
endeavors. Divided into five parts, the novel's first section, "The
Refuge," shows the decimation of the Anishinaabeg
during the period of 1800-1930; "The Re-Awakening" covers 1960-1990,
when tribes came out of termination and began to seek redress in the courts;
"The Occupation" portrays the growing use of civil action among
nationalistic Native groups in the late 1980s and early 1990s; "OshkiAnishinaabeg [the New
People]" as the title indicates, conveys a strong nationalist identity
reflected in revised community systems that integrate Anishinaabe
tradition with contemporary tribal life; and "Epilogue," set in
2018, where the narrator, Ishkwegaabawiikwe (Last
Standing Woman), discusses the importance of storytelling, remembrance, and
activism to tribal sovereignty.
Episodically structured, the narrative charts
key historical events in the colonization of North
America generally, and for the Anishinaabegs
in particular. Ishkwegaabawiikwe witnesses the 1862
hanging of her husband and other Dakota resistance warriors -- the same event
that Cook-Lynn discusses. LaDuke describes the ways
that U.S.
government and church agencies collaborated to dismantle the political,
religious, economic, and cultural systems of the Anishinaabes,
forcing them to conform to and obey federal laws. The Anishinaabegs
are subject to scientific exploitation as well as economic and religious
persecution. Consistent with the turn-of-the-century scientific methodology,
anthropologists visit the reservation and study the cranial capacity of many
tribal members who {74} are coerced into
cooperating by the Indian agent through illegal methods. The results of the
anthropological study are used to determine who is
authentically Indian, results that were typically inaccurate. When an
individual was labeled a "full blood" Anishinaabe,
he or she was usually found "incompetent" to hold or manage tribal
land. Only mixed-bloods cooperating with the Indian agent and local logging
companies were deemed competent to hold land. Hogan recounts a similar
scenario in Mean Spirit. This story is painfully familiar to readers
of Native literature and history; however, LaDuke
devotes some eighty pages detailing the systemic attempts to conquer and
destroy the Anishinaabe over 130 years' time in
order to inform all readers of the continuing history of Western dominance
over Native nations.

LaDuke's novel is more history than fiction,
more fact than fabrication. With depictions of historical subjugation of
Native cultures, along with contemporary movements of repatriation, land
appropriation, and economic projects of self-sufficiency, LaDuke
models the kind of novel that Cook-Lynn imagines and calls for. LaDuke always writes about the individual's
responsibility as it is realized in a communal context. Does LaDuke's adherence to Cook-Lynn's model make for good
fiction, for good "art"? The first half of Last Standing Woman recounts
the cultural, religious, and political atrocities of colonialism. It is the
events and conditions that LaDuke wishes the reader
to know. The events are all "true," historically verifiable through
tribal and government records. This section of the novel serves as a clear
introduction to the history of Indian-white relations. As history, it is
persuasive and clear. As a work of fiction, the novel vitalizes the events
that the majority of Native nations experienced during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
The narrative becomes more
lively when LaDuke moves to the present,
covering the occupation in the 1980s and its results through the imagined
future in 2018. These are events that LaDuke
herself has experienced and has helped to determine. In an interview with the
Utne Reader, LaDuke
reports that she wrote her novel sitting at her kitchen table over several
years' time, with the material coming {75}
to her in pieces. LaDuke is interested in reading
and writing "complicated books about peoples' personal contradictions
and struggles" that are politically rather than romantically motivated
(Steiner 98). Despite her expressed preference for nonfiction, LaDuke's choice to publish a novel allows her to reach a
wider audience, thereby producing the reform most important to her. Using a
genre different from her previous work, LaDuke
incorporates similar themes of political activism into a form that is more
popular than the political essay.6 Because students understand how
to read LaDuke's novel, they recognize why her
analysis is important.
Although Cook-Lynn is an accomplished poet and
essayist, she experiences problems in her novels -- a problem that she has
acknowledged. Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy, which contains From
the River's Edge, Circle of Dancers, and In the Presence of
River Gods, examines questions of survival and justice for the Crow
Creek Sioux of South Dakota. Set in the late 1960s through the present, the
novels trace the effects of damming, land appropriation, and cultural
disintegration on the Crow Creek Sioux. Despite some 460 pages of text,
Cook-Lynn fails to convey adequately the ideas that she so adamantly outlines
in her many essays on nationalistic literature. Writing about her trilogy,
Cook-Lynn observes, "there is an intellectual uncertainty in its whole
which is an appalling and unexpected flaw in the imaginative work of a
daughter of tribal politicians, men and women for whom there was no
ideological ambivalence concerning nationhood" ("American Indian
Fiction Writer" 30). True, Indian nationhood does appear uncertain at
the trilogy's ending, as does a clear intellectual perspective or model for
possible action. While this political and intellectual ambiguity may trouble
the author, it may accurately reflect the artistic difficulties inherent in
ideological fiction and does not necessarily signal an aesthetic lack.
What Cook-Lynn provides is a thoughtful
exploration of the difficulties surrounding Indian survival and the future of
tribal sovereignty. That she does not provide a solution to these problems
may trouble Cook-Lynn as a writer and intellectual whose nonfiction demands
that writers produce such solutions; however, for the reader, Cook-Lynn's
difficulties may be viewed as representative of {76}
the challenges confronting Indian nations themselves. The lack of resolution
to ongoing issues makes for a more intellectually interesting text. There is
little ambiguity in LaDuke's novel; in Cook-Lynn's
text, as in Hogan's Power, ambiguity and the lack of closure abound.
Cook-Lynn concludes the trilogy thus:

This has not been a story about murderers and rapists. Nor
is it a story about a specific crime. It is not even about a particular
victim. It is a story that gives a frame of reference for those interested in
how it is that a memory-laden people live their lives; a context, if you
will. It is a story about myth, a story that Aurelia Blue has told to others
and that has become the stuff of history, an ingredient of the oral narrative
poetry transmitted by word of mouth from one singer, one teller of tales, to
another. (455)

Cook-Lynn tells us that her novels do not outline facts of Sioux history;
instead, her work offers a context in which to read and understand the Crow
Creek Sioux culture, however ambiguous that may be. She instructs the reader how
to read her work and why it is important.
We might ask, then, does the uncertainty
evident in Aurelia mark Cook-Lynn's novel as a failure? If so, a
failure as what -- a realistic novel, a historical novel, an ideological
novel, a novel of nationalism? Is the application of Susan Suleiman's trope of the ideological novel useful to
comprehending Cook-Lynn's work? Certainly when we consider Last Standing
Woman as an ideological novel, we see how often it conforms to the model
Suleiman outlines. The novel presents us with colonial histories
"realistically" told from the point of view of the colonized
speaker; it seeks to inform us of events that we have previously not known
and to validate the Native ideologies represented. In Last Standing
Woman, the "truth" of history, along with the constructive
elements of Native culture, are affirmed as
absolutes. The author wants us to "see" the "truth" of
Native history and share her worldview. That LaDuke
generally succeeds in this endeavor affirms the power of her novel.
The ideological novel "flourishes in
national contexts, and at {77} historical
moments, that produce sharp social and ideological conflicts -- in other
words, in a climate of crisis" (Suleiman 17). The genre exists in
"a cultural tradition that fosters the involvement of writers in social
and intellectual debates or problems" (Suleiman 16-17). Like the roman
à thèse, the novels of LaDuke,
Hogan, and Cook-Lynn arise from the economic, cultural, and spiritual crises
of Native Americans. As Indian writers, they work within traditions governing
Native storytellers -- to set the record straight, thereby preserving their
cultures' integrity -- and they serve as actors in social and intellectual
debates within their cultures just as Suleiman describes.
The ideological novel embodies and confronts
several problems. The novel's desire to prove something, its claims of
verisimilar representation, have made it suspect within literary criticism.
The ideological novel is often dismissed as propaganda and deemed
artistically invalid (Suleiman 3). The more a text adheres to the rules of
the ideological novel, "the further away it moves from Literature with a
capital L" and the less interesting it becomes to contemporary critics,
thereby signaling the "aesthetic flaw" that Cook-Lynn describes
(Suleiman 8). The ideological novel's desire to convey a stable meaning to
the reader, to "communicate" a message, arouses the suspicion of
modern criticism. Also problematic, the genre's issue-specific nature
potentially limits the life of the text. Because the roman à thèseseeks to redress a specific
political issue, it becomes irrelevant once that issue has passed. Its brief
shelf life further undermines the ideological novel's artistic value.
According to Suleiman, modern literary criticism privileges a text's
"aesthetic function" over its "communicative function"
(20-21). Citing Roland Barthes as an example, Suleiman writes that modernist
texts seek to "multiply meaning or to 'pulverize' it" (22). That
is, they embrace hybridity, multiplicity,
ambiguity, and focus on the reader's process of making meaning. They are
examples of the cosmopolitanism that Cook-Lynn derides. Because the roman
à thèseis an "authoritarian
genre," appealing to the need for certainty, stability, and unity, it
cannot tolerate the ambiguity and open-endedness encouraged in a modernist
text.
The overtly ideological nature of LaDuke's work and Cook-Lynn's {78}
prose may explain the dearth of criticism surrounding their work as well as
the noncommercial presses that publish them. LaDuke's
novel suggests that there is a single way to interpret the colonization of
Native groups. Cook-Lynn's discussion of the Indian artist/intellectual and
nationalistic versus cosmopolitan literature suggests a similar monologic viewpoint.
Another difficulty inherent in the roman à thèseis the tension between the novelistic aspects
of the text and the ideological aims of the piece. As a work of fiction, the
novel affords the writer unlimited opportunities of invention and imagination;
however, as the articulation of a set ideology, the genre demands an
adherence to verisimilar representation -- the very opposite of invention. As
an "impure, unstable genre, rent by contradictory desires," the
ideological novel is "perhaps condemned to missing its aims, either on
one side or on the other" (Suleiman 23). This conflict is evident in
Cook-Lynn's trilogy. While she calls for total closure on the single topic --
Indian nationalism -- Cook-Lynn confesses her ambivalence. As the excerpt I
examine above reveals, Cook-Lynn is not content with a single reading of her
work. She advises us that the trilogy is not about any one act or theme; nor
does it provide complete closure. Instead, she ends her work instructing the
reader to think contextually or referentially about the Crow Creek Sioux, a
much more interesting and complicated approach. LaDuke's
novel adheres most fully to terms of the roman à thèsethat Suleiman outlines. Her text represents a problem and outlines a
solution, offering the reader a blueprint for Indian activism and
self-sufficiency, rather than a work of imaginative creation. As a result,
the reader learns about political and historical elements that are crucial to
Anishinaabe and -- on a larger scale -- North
American Indigenism; however, Last Standing
Woman is not a novel that requires a second or third reading to satisfy
aesthetic criteria. Rather, it informs readers and potentially shapes a group
of activists concerned about Indian sovereignty and Indigenism.
I have focused less on Hogan's novels in this
discussion because they do not adhere completely to the model of the
ideological novel, although they do share thematic elements of the genre. All
three novels realistically represent the encroachment of the white world on
the {79} Native. Mean Spirit shows
the calculated murder of Osage individuals who own oil-rich land, the illegal
seizure of their land allotments, the theft of Osage federal payments, and
the ultimate failure of the American justice system to protect Osage
interests and lives. Solar Storms depicts the irrevocable damage
from flooding Native lands, the illegal persecution and harassment of the
grassroots movements protesting the dams, and the failure of the justice
system to protect tribal interests. Power also examines the
destructive results of Western hegemony, focusing on the tribes of the
Everglades, citing Columbus, Darwin, the Seminole chief Osceola, and the
decimation of the sacred panther as contexts. After enduring a state trial
that denigrates their traditions, the Taiga characters most concerned with
tribal survival reject the white world in favor of their own; they retreat to
the depths of the Florida
swamp.
Hogan's texts all end with the promise of human
redemption and connection with the natural world. She ends Solar Storms thus:
"Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You
will see" (351). Echoing Suleiman's
observations, Hogan insists that we "see" and share her worldview.
Reading her texts, we too can be redeemed. Similarly, LaDuke
ends Last Standing Woman with words taken from the protagonist's
journal. Written first in Ojibwe and then in
English, Ishkwegaabawiikwe writes: "I wrote
this because I am called to write . . . [t]o understand our relationship to the
whole and our role on the path of life. We also understand our
responsibility. We only take what we need, and we leave the rest" (299).
Ishkwegaabawiikwe's
didacticism is aimed at a reader she hopes to convert. Her words and their
sentiments are shared by many Native women writers. Interestingly, Ishkwegaabawiikwe's journal ends in 2018, suggesting that
LaDuke hopes to avoid complete narrative closure
and wants the reader to read beyond the ending. The date also conveys LaDuke's optimism that Anishinaabe
culture will survive, that their stories will continue.7 Like
Cook-Lynn's ambiguous conclusion,LaDuke's writing beyond the resolution of the events she
describes reflects the desire shared by both authors to keep their novels
relevant and free from time constraints. Cook-Lynn and LaDuke
express a hope that their novels avoid the fate that dooms {80} the roman à thèseto obscurity once the crisis depicted has passed. Their rejection of a
linear, finite timeline, along with their insistence that history remains a
vital part of the present and future, represent
their efforts to maintain the life of their novels. In this manner, they work
within a timeframe of many Native writers, one that is cyclical rather than
linear, one that, they believe, defies Western modes of interpretation.
Instead of interpretation, then, the critic's
work is one of contextualization, of exploring why these works are important
to Native intellectuals and activists. The works of all three authors seek to
persuade their readers of the value and authority their fictions represent.
They provide a realistic representation of what contemporary Native life is,
along with a vision of what can be achieved. Sometimes didactic in tone,
often persuasive and visionary, these works insist upon the engagement of the
reader in the ongoing project of Indian sovereignty.

NOTES

1. Hogan's
poetry, however, is published by smaller houses such as the Coffeehouse Press
and the Greenfield Review.
2. LaDuke observes
that Indian reservations are targeted as sites for sixteen proposed nuclear
waste storage facilities; over one hundred proposals have been made in recent
years to dump toxic waste in Indian communities, and seventy-seven sacred
sites have been disturbed or desecrated through both resource extraction and
development. The Western Shoshone land in Nevada has sustained one thousand atomic
explosions over the last forty-five years, making it, according to LaDuke, "the most bombed nation on earth." More
than one thousand slag piles and tailings from abandoned uranium mines are
located on Diné (Navajo) land, emitting radioactive
material into the air and water. The largest coal strip mine in the world is
located nearby and gives rise to cancer rates in teenagers that is seventeen
times the national average (All Our Relations 2-3).
3. In the trilogy Aurelia, Cook-Lynn
addresses the question of individual survival with more anxiety than is
evident in her essays. The Crow Creek Sioux protagonist John Tatekeya,
embroiled in a futile court case over stolen cattle, worries over the future
of his tribe: "His fear than an honorable life for his people was no
longer possible rose in this throat. There were so many {81} things that
he had not paid attention to, and he knew now what terrible risk there was in
such inattentiveness" (70). Cook-Lynn has since criticized her position
in this novel; I discuss this at greater length later.
4. The fragmented individual is familiar in
contemporary American literature generally and in Native literature in
particular. Omishto becomes an integrated inividual once she rejoins the Taigas of Kili Swamp and leaves the white world behind; this choice
of binaries seems to suggest that Omishto becomes
integrated only through choosing one identity over another.
5. "White Earth: A Lifeway
in the Forest," in All Our
Relations, and "The White Earth Land Struggle" are good
examples.
6. I have taught Last Standing Woman,
All
Our Relations, and Cook-Lynn's Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegnerin different courses of undergraduate
literature. Not surprisingly, students initially favor the novel over the
essay collections.
7. It is not random chance that LaDuke chooses the year 2018; it is the year that the 189
United Nations Member States have pledged to meet eight overarching goals,
labeled the UN Millennium Development Goals, which include eradicating
"extreme poverty and hunger," achieving "universal primary
education," promoting "gender equality" and empowering women,
and ensuring "environmental sustainability," along with other
reform plans, all reflecting the Indigenist agenda
that LaDuke and others promote. As a delegate of
the 1995 Beijing Women's Conference and member of the Indigenist
Women's Network, LaDuke is very aware of and
committed to these goals. For more information about the development goals,
see www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index.html.

WORKS CITED

Brumble,
H. David. American Indian Autobiography. Berkeley:
University of
California Press, 1988.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. "The American Indian Fiction Writer:
'Cosmopolitanism,' Nationalism, the Third World,
and First Nation Sovereignty." Wicazo
Sa Review 9.2 (1993): 26-36.

------."American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian
Story." Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about
American Indians. Ed. Devon Mihesuah. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press,
1998. 111-38.

------. Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A
Voice from Tatekaya's Earth. Urbana:
University of
Illinois Press, 2001.

Will Rogers's
Indian Humor

ROUMIANA VELIKOVA

By the time of his death in 1935, political humorist Will Rogers had
become one of the most famous personalities in the United States. Through his
syndicated weekly articles and daily telegrams, films, and radio broadcasts, Rogers reached an
estimated audience of forty million. Because of his deft use of the venues of
mass entertainment -- from the vaudeville stage to Hollywood -- and the
consequent mainstreaming of his act, it may be easy to pass over the side of
Rogers that was not so mainstream: born in 1879 in Indian Territory, Rogers
was a member of the Cherokee Nation for the first twenty years of his life.
He became a naturalized American citizen after the 1898 Curtis Act brought
the disbanding of tribal government and the allotment of land in severalty to
the Five Tribes. Billed as a cowboy from Oklahoma
and as a self-made diplomat to the president, nominated for the presidency
because of the broad appeal of his home-spun humor and common sense, Rogers's commercially
crafted all-American public identity is a simplification of a complex
personal and national history. Rogers's
humor has been discussed as the American-grown cracker-barrel humor
originating with Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard. "Horse sense,"
as Walter Blair wrote in 1942, is that "good, sound, practical
sense" that Will Rogers shares with Franklin, Josh Billings, Davy Crockett, and
an assortment of other American humorists (vi). While Blair sees horse sense
as peculiar to North America, he does not attribute any part of Rogers's humor to the part-Cherokee identity Rogers claimed as his
own. This failure to {84} acknowledge the
tribal specificity of Rogers's humor is probably due to the stereotype of the
stoic Indian -- the "granite-faced grunting redskin," as Vine Deloria Jr. puts it in his study of Indian humor Custer
Died for Your Sins (148). A biography of Rogers, written immediately after his death
in 1935, exemplifies the influence of this stereotype. The biographer, P. J.
O'Brien, parcels out Rogers's
talents among his three lines of descent: his humor is Irish; his business
sense, Scotch; his "dignity and reserve," Indian (24). It may be
that because no one looked for an Indian sense of humor in Rogers, his audiences missed the sting of
his jokes. This obliviousness to Indian humor may have actually contributed
to Rogers's
mainstream appeal as well.
In a larger sense, Rogers has been appropriated not only as an
American humorist but as a mythic American figure. William R. Brown has
posited Rogers
as an embodiment of four basic cultural myths -- the innocent "American
Adam" (37), the egalitarian "American democrat" (91), the
resourceful "self-made man" (161), and the technologically savvy
"American Prometheus" (209). Although Rogers's Cherokee ancestry is
featured in Brown's study, Brown mainly wants to incorporate Rogers in a
broad American framework, similar to Blair's framework of general American
humor, denying Rogers any kind of cultural or political specificity that may
endanger this abstract all-American representativeness.
Furthermore, because Rogers was an acculturated mixed-blood, his
Native side has not been taken seriously. One biographer, Richard Ketchum,
quotes Rogers's
son as saying that his father and grandfather were "upwardly
mobile" and chose to accommodate white ways rather than traditional
Cherokee culture (58). Will Rogers
was connected to the Cherokees even less than his father because he married a
white woman and lived away from the territory of the Cherokee Nation. But "he
became too much of a showman not to realize the appeal an Indian background
had for an audience" (Ketchum 58). The implication is that because Rogers was not
traditional, he was not a real Indian; he used Indianness
simply as a market ploy.
As a result of this mainstreaming, Rogers has long been
denied a prominent place in Native American literary history. Recently,
however, Native scholars have called for a reassessment of the proper {85} subject of Native American studies. Robert
Warrior encourages a broader approach to Native American writing -- open to a
greater variety of genres, to issues other than essential identity and
survival, and to earlier periods of forced acculturation (xix-xx). Warrior
suggests that the reintegration into Native American studies of Will Rogers's
political humor would avoid the essentialism that assigns to Native Americans
unchanging traditional values and beliefs and the expression of them within
certain limited venues.
Craig Womack calls for a "literary separatism"
that would look at literary production not simply as a reflection of culture
but as a reflection of sovereignty. Like Warrior, he challenges the
stereotype of the traditional Indian as the only real Indian because this
stereotype denies Native cultures the ability to change and still preserve
their separate political identities. According to Womack,

The tendency to put native people in this reductive
tainted/ untainted framework occurs, at least partially, because Indians are
thought of not in terms of their true legal status, which is as members of
nations, but as cultural artifacts. Native people are seldom regarded in
terms of the political and legal ramifications of tribal nationalism. (141)

What Womack proposes as an answer to the vexed question of Native identity
is ultimately a politically committed criticism that

roots literature in land and
culture. This criticism emphasizes unique Native worldviews and political
realities, searches for differences as often as similarities, and attempts to
find Native literature's place in Indian country, rather than Native
literature's place in the canon. (11)

Rogers's
acculturation may explain the ease with which he became a popular hero, but
it obscures his vocal identification as a Cherokee and the subtleties of his
Indian humor. His direct involvement in U.S.
politics, as an ironic commentator, places Rogers within the framework of Native
intellectual independence advocated by Warrior and Womack. Rogers
writes from within a tradition of Native intellectuals who engage critically
with U.S.
political and patriotic dis-{86}course.
In fact, Womack claims that Rogers
is "the next link" after the Creek journalist Alex Posey "in
developing a unique brand of Indian humor" (172).
Like Posey, Rogers
commented repeatedly on U.S. Indian policies: allotment, American Indian
citizenship, the integration of Indian Territory into the state of Oklahoma, the dissolution of tribal governments, and
the participation of Indians in U.S. national politics. Posey
wrote the FusFixico
letters for a Creek audience and chose not to seek mainstream acceptance
(Womack 140). In contrast, Rogers
took his political commentary to the national media and addressed it to a
larger predominantly non-Native audience that grew to love him.
Yet there is no denying that Rogers wrote from a position inherently
antagonistic to his audience. He played on his audience's nativist
prejudices and used American patriotic rhetoric successfully to reassert its
very negation: the Native right to land possession and independence. When he
billed himself as an American, Rogers was aware that as a naturalized citizen
of the United
States
he was less than 100 percent American by the standards of exclusive nativist organizations. He considered himself American in
a very different sense. Rather than vying for a spot among the mythical
Pilgrims who came to America
on the Mayflower, some of Rogers's
ancestors on both sides of his family tree were indigenous to the continent
now called North America. Among its other
strategies, nativist writing in the 1920s sought to
legitimize European Americans as descendants of the supposedly vanished
American Indian; it used the trope of "the vanishing American" to
channel its paranoia of continuing immigration (Michaels 32, 29). Rogers's political satire thus could tap for material at
the very mainsprings of U.S.nativism.
I have chosen as the main criterion for
evaluating the indigenous aspects of Rogers's
humor Kenneth Lincoln's observation in Indi'n
Humor of the special "rootedness" of
Indians (and Indian humor) in the continent of North
America (215). In its claim to land possession, Indian humor is,
I believe, irreducibly antagonistic to the integrationist categories proposed
by Walter Blair but also implied in Lincoln's conclusion that "tribal
humor stitches the frayed cross-cultural fabric of multiethnic America"
(313) -- that is, that Indian {87} humor
ultimately performs a restorative role within the nation at large. If my
study stops one step before reconciliation and integration, it is mostly
because the understanding of Rogers's
humor appears to have suffered from this desire to assimilate it rather too
quickly within the larger category of American humor.
Drawing on Native scholars' rationale for exploring
the intellectual production of American Indians, I focus on Rogers's response
to the conditions that brought him into the fray of U.S. politics: the
succession of allotment acts meant to assimilate American Indians, the
inclusion of Indian Territory into the state of Oklahoma, the naturalization
of American Indians as U.S. citizens, and their participation in U.S.
politics. These processes that cut at the root of Native political and
territorial independence in the early twentieth century are alluded to in Rogers's humorous
comments about his American citizenship and in his nostalgia for the days of
tribal sovereignty.
Rogers's Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to
His President appeared in 1926, two years after the passage of the last
Indian Citizenship Act.1 Initially the articles comprising the
text ran as dispatches from Rogers's European trip to the Philadelphia
Saturday Evening Post, whose editor, George Horace Lorimer,
had suggested both the trip and the title (Yagoda
228). What is particularly interesting about this series of letters is not so
much Rogers's
commentary on European politics and culture but the question of his
legitimacy as an American diplomat, a position that carries a citizenship
requirement. While the title of the series humorously suggests a breach of
appointment procedure, in the very first letter the self-made diplomat raises
the question of his status as an American citizen.
The title was developed by analogy to Lorimer's own successful series "Letters from a Self-Made
Merchant to His Son," first published anonymously in the Post in
1901-02 and then issued as a bestselling book. This series of fictional
letters expressed Lorimer's belief in traditional
American business values and fit squarely into the myth of the self-made man.
The humor, the southwestern flavor, and the provinciality of the merchant's
speech (Tebbel 29-30) were very similar to Rogers's own anti-intellectual, anti-eastern
establishment pose as a cowboy from Oklahoma.
The title of Rogers's series {88} was most
probably an attempt to cash in on Lorimer's earlier
contagious success.2 While the title and the idea for the series
were not Rogers's, the change of subject -- from business to politics --
changes the meaning of self-making, and while Rogers and Lorimer
may have had some very similar views and ways of expression, Rogers's
relation to the presidency and to American citizenship is peculiarly his own.
The title of Roger's series is humorous because
it implies the self-made diplomat's illegitimacy, since diplomats are as a
rule officially appointed. The political connotation of self-making is
different from the economic, because within the myth of a classless
laissez-faire society, the insistence on the possibility of economic
self-making and self-reliance is actually one of the basic means of
legitimizing the existing social order. Political self-making, however,
especially in relation to the admission of Native Americans (and other
marginalized groups) to American citizenship, is a much more controversial
issue. The "Author's Note" humorously explains the legitimacy of
the self-made diplomat on the basis of his "intimate understanding"
of President Coolidge's wishes so that the latter did not even have to ask
him to go on the trip (5). Because American Indian citizenship supposedly
"destined" Indians "to live on the fringes of
civilization" (Hoxie 96), Rogers claims
an ironic position of intimacy with the U.S. president. He rhetorically
occupies the center rather than the margin.
The first article goes on to question the
citizenship status of the self-made diplomat and the reality of his
"intimate" relationship with the U.S. president. No longer at
issue is the breach of appointment procedure in diplomatic circles but the
legitimacy of the procedure for granting American citizenship, as steeped as
it is in ideological mystification. In his first letter as a self-made
diplomat, Rogers
gives a Native American treatment of the question "What makes an
American citizen?"
The letters pretend to be a running commentary
on Rogers's trip to Europe
in the vein of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, but with a focus on
"the pressing foreign policy issues confronting the nation" (Letters
xix). They begin with a commentary on an important domes-{89}tic
issue, or depending on one's interpretation of Native sovereignty and the
persistent duality of Native American citizenship, this issue may be viewed
as one of foreign policy as well. The attempt to ascertain Rogers's American citizenship runs into a
problem characteristic of the period of mandatory assimilation. Upon applying
for a travel passport for his European trip, Rogers is asked to produce his birth
certificate, a standard bureaucratic procedure for ascertaining identity and
citizenship. Rogers interprets the formality as a paradox -- not as proof of
his identity, but literally as proof of his birth, and therefore of his
existence, implying that his presence in front of the official is not
sufficient evidence that he was born at an earlier point in time. The humor
of the situation is produced by the confrontation between the official's
supposedly unreasonable demand and the "early days of the Indian Territory" (Letters 12) when one's
presence was sufficient evidence for one's alleged birth.
When Rogers
refers to Indian Territory, he refers to the
time before the dissolution of tribal governments when he would have been a
well-to-do member of a fully functional Cherokee Nation. The Rogers family
lost a great deal of their large estate in the process of allotment.3 While
the Cherokees adapted to allotment and Oklahoma statehood, in his writing
Rogers often bemoans the loss of Indian Territory and satirizes the interests
that created the state of Oklahoma. Part of his sentimentality and nostalgia
may be for a simpler agricultural past, but it is also nostalgia for a state
of affairs that involved the hope and efforts until 1907 that the disparate
Indian tribes that had been removed to Indian Territory
over the course of the nineteenth century may be allowed to form their own
state. In a weekly article of January 24, 1924, Rogers writes:

There is a good deal in the papers about giving my native
state of Oklahoma
back to the Indians. Now I am a Cherokee Indian and very proud of it, but I
doubt if you can get them to accept it -- not in its present state.
When the white folks come in and took Oklahoma from us, they
spoiled a mighty happy hunting ground, just to give Sinclair a racing ground,
and Walton a barbecue. (WA 1:185)4

{90}
Rogers here responds to the mainstream quip
that when something does not work it should be given back to the Indians,
implying either that it was defective to begin with or that it has
malfunctioned and is discardable now. Although he
deflects from the political import of his writing with the stereotypical
description of Indian paradise as a "happy hunting ground," Rogers is clearly separating the Indian
Territory governed by Indian tribes from what he sees as its
subsequent corruption by white entrepreneurs and politicians. There is a
sense in this passage that before Indian Territory was incorporated into the
state of Oklahoma, it was Indian not only in name; it actually belonged to
the Indians.5
This emphasis on Indian possession of Indian
Territory is evident in Rogers's writing on a number of other occasions as
well. On March 7, 1926, Rogers
admits, "Really at heart I love ranching. I have always regretted that I
didn't live about 30 or 40 years earlier, and in the same old Country, the Indian Territory. I would have liked to got here ahead of the 'Nestors,'
the Bob wire fence, and so called civilization" (WA 2:160).
Significantly, in the first decades after the Civil War (roughly the period
to which Rogers alludes),
the few whites in Indian Territory were an underclass
of tenants to wealthy Indian ranchers (Zissu 16). Rogers obviously regrets the passing of this economic
and political dominance of Indians in Indian Territory.
The Cherokee Nation is also a referent in the
passport scene of the first letter of the self-made diplomat. After Rogers's initial "naive" misunderstanding that
his birth certificate is the only way to verify his existence, the female
bureaucrat is forced to clarify that she needs the certificate to ascertain Rogers's American
citizenship. Rogers
writes:

That was the first time I had ever been called on to prove
that. Here my Father and Mother were both one-eighth Cherokee Indians and I
have been on the Cherokee rolls since I was named, and my family had lived on
one ranch for 75 years. But just offhand, how was I to show that I was born
in America?
The English that I spoke had none of the earmarks of the Mayflower.
(Letters 12)

{91}
The opposition that Rogers
sets up is between the myth of America
as an immigrant nation and himself as an enrolled Cherokee Indian, who was
born on Cherokee land and therefore on the contested territory of North America. His status as a Cherokee is not in
question, but his status as an American is. He does not qualify under the nativist theory that the only true Americans were of
Anglo-Saxon descent and derived from the Pilgrims on the Mayflower. Rogers may be native to North America, but he is still
outside the ideological parameters of the United States. He does not dwell
on the legal complications of his case -- that it
was because he was allotted land that he became an U.S. citizen in the first place.
During the film version of this scene in So
This Is London (1930), Rogers
adds that his ancestors actually "met the boat," and "it is to
the everlasting discredit of the Indian race that they ever let the Pilgrims
land" (May 31; The Story of Will Rogers). According to this
version, the Indians at a certain time in history had the power to make the
decision of who belongs in North America
that now is in the hands of the bureaucratic descendants of the Pilgrims. Rogers draws an
opposition between Native Americans, the true Americans if citizenship is
guaranteed by place of birth, and all immigrant Americans, including the
Pilgrims. If it is a matter of precedence that established the Mayflower passengers'
claims to authenticity over later immigrants, Native Americans have the
advantage of being the first known settlers of North America.6
Rogers satirizes not only the Pilgrims but also
the current uses of them by people like President Coolidge, who built his
credentials on being their descendant and named his boat the Mayflower.
Addressing the president, Rogers
writes: "So as you sail down on the Mayflower tomorrow to keep away from
the Congressmen I will be on the Leviathan with my oldest son of 14 -- who is
also a naturalized American citizen" (Letters 13). Rogers distinguishes
himself not only from the original Pilgrims but from the president he
addresses: they are sailing on different ships ("ships of state"
being a metaphor for political government). In this statement, Rogers acknowledges clearly what he refused to admit
earlier: that he was a naturalized American citizen, that is, that the U.S. government treated the indig-{92}enous
people of North America no differently than
the first-generation immigrants to the continent. Such an acknowledgement
shows his awareness of the actual legal procedure of granting citizenship to
Indians. This awareness, however, is slipped very discreetly in a joke that
focuses on the parodic regurgitation of nativist myths.
Since immigration is the main reason for
regulating travel to and from the United States, and since naturalization
works the same way for both Indians, who are native-born to the American continent,
and immigrants, who are not, Rogers raises the issue of the similarity
between Native Americans and the new arrivals to the big cities on the U.S.
eastern seaboard: "It was as hard to find an American in New York as it
was to get a passport" (Letters 13). Nativists
like Lothrop Stoddard claimed that "the Nordic native American" was
disappearing because of the influx of immigrants, who may have become
American citizens but could never become Americans in the narrow ideological
sense in which the nativists defined their
entitlement (Michaels 29). In this sense, Rogers spoofs the nativist
paranoia about the changing character of the nation. In another sense, Rogers
comments on his own isolation in New York -- away from his own nation and in
the heart of the United States, where there is no one to authenticate him as
an American. While he sets an opposition between himself and the recent
immigrants, Rogers
also understands the similarity of their situation when confronted with the
exclusive category of 100 percent Americanism. The witness he finally finds
to prove his birth tells him: "Why, sure I knew your Father well, and I
know that you are an American. Not 100 percent ones like the Rotarray's and Kiawanises and
Lions, but enough to pay taxes" (Letters 13). Rogers
explains his sailing on the Leviathan as a further justification of
citizenship in terms of concrete civic actions that merit recognition:
"Being not what is proclaimed as a 100 percent American, I went over on
an American boat. The 100 percenters all go on
English or French, such as Hotel Men and Rotary Associations" (Letters
15). Rogers here draws a distinction between birthright and commitment
to one's country, or earning one's citizenship, that is reminiscent of the
call for a committed Americanism in the Progressive Era before World War I. {93}
The self-made diplomat's earnest protestations
betray an uncertainty about his own status as a naturalized citizen of the
United States. Indians, according to Rogers,
seem to have remained permanently outside the Union.
He suggests as much in his comment on the backwater habits of the Kentucky mountains:
"It's the last stand of primitive and hundred per cent Americanism
(leaving out us Injuns, which of course they always do. Left 'em out so long till they are perpetually out)" (WA
5:234). In its gist, the 100 percent Americanism is what unites the
members of the exclusive Rotary Club and the mountain hicks of Kentucky. The joke
pokes fun not only at the social pretenses of the exclusive nativist clubs but also at Rogers's own position as a
mock political commentator, an equal to American presidents, even a mock candidate
for the presidency. In spite of all these self-appointed roles, Rogers is unsure about his precise status in the United States; yet he is certain about
belonging in North America.
The forced remaking of Native Americans into
American citizens was never a completely successful process, but it brought
enough Native public figures within the halls of the state and federal senates
and involved them directly in American policy making. As a rule, the
engagement with U.S.
politics was the domain of the mixed-blood Native elites. Will Rogers's father, Clem Rogers, made the transition from
the Cherokee tribal government to the state government of Oklahoma. During his tenure as a political
commentator, Rogers covered the careers of
Native politicians like the part-Cherokee U.S.
senator from Oklahoma Robert Owen and the part-Kaw Kansas senator Charles Curtis. Curtis was
directly involved in the setting of U.S. Indian policy with arguably
disastrous results for American Indians. Yet he was nevertheless hailed as a
success and a hope for change by his own tribe and by Rogers,
who appears to have been unaware of the precise role Curtis
played in forcing the Five Tribes into allotment and into the state of Oklahoma.
Senator Curtis of Kansas was of a mixed Kaw, Osage, and
French descent, and like Rogers and other Indians involved in politics at the
time, he belonged to an already acculturated Native elite. William Unrau, in Mixed-Bloods and Tribal Dissolution, argues
that in push-{94}ing
through his allotment bill Curtis was motivated by his desire to show that
mixed-blood children should have equal rights to tribal property. Curtis set
out to prove the importance of mixed-bloods to the U.S. government, thus turning a
personal issue into a political program. Unrau
describes the contradictory nature of Curtis's claims and actions in relation
to the passage of his bill:

Before 1898, Curtis had complained about the Dawes
Commission's intent unilaterally to abrogate time-honored Indian treaties,
but in fact this was precisely what the bill that he wrote accomplished. By
abolishing tribal courts, by instituting civil government in Indian
Territory, by requiring that tribal individuals submit to allotment
regardless of the consequences, and by providing the guidelines for political
union with the state of Oklahoma, the act was far more radical than the one
that the Dawes people envisaged prior to 1898. The very title of the law,
"An Act for the protection of the people of the Indian Territory and for other purposes," was a
clever deception, designed to give the impression that the exploitation of the
Oklahoma Indians was a thing of the past. (123; emphasis in original)

To Unrau, the
Curtis Act was the response of a conservative Republican to the potential
threat of the formation of a separate Indian state in Indian
Territory that would be democratic and would oppose the big
business interests in the area (121-23). This part of Curtis's resume was not
advertised during his electoral campaign as Herbert Hoover's running mate.
His part-Indian background could be safely exoticized
because in the 1920s Curtis was not really interested in the state of Indian
affairs and made no campaign promises for a change in federal policy toward
the Indians (161, 163). Rogers's support of Curtis's electoral campaign in
1928 shows how much his impression of the politician's character is
influenced by media reports as well as the spin Rogers puts on those reports.
Rogers
never gives up his belief that Curtis will represent Indian interests. What
seems even more important to him is that Curtis is at least part-Indian and
successful in politics. His bid for Curtis {95}
shows Rogers's
anxiety about anti-Indian discrimination. But most important, Curtis seems to
have fascinated Rogers because his political
aspirations provide material for a joke that Rogers savors repeatedly. He follows the
forced assimilation of Native Americans to a self-destructive end: if an
Indian becomes an American president, then he could dismantle the institution
of the presidency and the United
States as a whole.
On June 9, 1928, he reminds the Republican
Convention about their obligation to Curtis's candidacy:

And don't forget Charley Curtis. You Republicans owe him
more than you do anybody outside of your Campaign contributors. The trouble is
he is so faithful that the chances are he will never be rewarded. He has
stayed with you through all your disgraces and never got mixed up in any of
them. He is an Indian. I wish he would get in. Us
Indians would run these White people out of this country. (More Letters 91)

After Curtis is nominated, Rogers
writes in a telegram dated June 15, 1928:

I been telling you for days that
Curtis would be the one. He is a Kaw Indian and me a Cherokee and I am for
him. It's the first time we have ever got a break -- the only American that
has ever run for that high office. . . . Come on, Injun! If you are elected
let's run the white people out of this country. (DT 1:223-24)

Rogers
advances these propositions as jokes, and their humorous threat is
deactivated anyway by the complicity of mixed-blood Indian politicians in
destructive U.S. Indian policies. The point, however, is that this type of
humor cannot be written off as an example of all-American humor because of
its peculiar anti-United States intent, especially because, for Rogers,
America and the United States are not synonymous.
In December 1928, Rogers was disappointed at
seeing Curtis "set . . . back to nothing but a Toastmaster" (WA
3:235-36),and in a 1930 radio broadcast on
Curtis he repeats the relative unimportance of the vice presidency and of
Curtis's role, which he turns into a joke: {96}
"When he is not asleep in the Senate, he is at the races" (Radio
19). While Unrau attributes Curtis's
ineffectiveness to his lack of interest in Indian affairs, Rogers gives Curtis the benefit of the
doubt, describing him as a victim of political machinations. Despite his
disappointment, in 1930 Rogers
returns to his initial humorous proposition, albeit in a slightly different
form: "So good luck to you, Charlie, old Injun, and I hope you are
elected President some day and we will run the White House out of this
country" (Radio 20). In this version, Rogers uses a pun to
produce the mixed effect of both conducting and ending American presidential
politics, much in the same way as his earlier joke hoped that Indian
involvement in American politics would bring an end to the non-Native
occupation of North America.
In different versions, this joke has proven a
favorite among Native Americans, who have adapted it to changing historical
circumstances. Deloria provides two later
adaptations of it. In a poll during the Vietnam War, which characteristically
shows Native Americans not following the antiwar protests of the period,
"only 15 percent of the Indians thought that the United States should get out of Vietnam.
Eighty-five percent thought they should get out of America!" (Deloria 157). The second version is Clyde Warrior's
response to the argument that, since 70 percent of Americans live in the
cities, the bid for traditional Native life seems behind the times,
"Don't you realize what this means?" Warrior asks. "It means
we are pushing them into the cities. Soon we will have the country back
again" (168). Rogers tells a wide variety
of other jokes that Deloria has identified as
central to Native humor; these include jokes about Columbus,
Custer, broken treaties, and land theft.7 They all place Rogers squarely within
the tradition of Indian humor and outside mainstream American humor. Rogers
keeps open the hypothetical possibility for rhetorical mastery of such
concepts as the vice presidency and the presidency. He often toys with the
idea of running for president himself; yet it is interesting that when his
mock candidacy was picked up in 1928 by the editor of the humorous Life
magazine,
Rogers participated only half-heartedly in the election campaign on his
behalf.8 It may be {97} true
that, as his editor says, the mock campaign gave Rogers another opportunity
to mock politicians (He Chews ix); yet Rogers scorned any serious
suggestion that he run for president since he believed that the United States
was not as desperate as to elect its comedians.
Thus in an early 1925 self-nomination, Rogers
simply spoofs President Coolidge's candidacy by claiming that if he were
elected, Rogers would show Americans "some life"; he would liven up
the inauguration by bringing to Washington Cherokees, cowboys, movie stars,
and aviators, that is, all groups with which he was closely associated (WA
2:1-3). Rogers's view of the presidency
here is detached not only because his attitude towards U.S. politics
is not simply that of an American citizen but also because as a humorous
commentator, he is above all an entertainer. He is thus twice removed from U.S.
politics. Since the Cherokees are "the most highly civilized tribe of
Indians in the World . . . they could have stood it a few days in Washington
even among those low brow surroundings" (WA 2:1). The
implication of this statement is double: that Rogers, as a Cherokee, could
not have survived long in Washington and that the civilization of the
Cherokees is different and superior to the political and social climate in
the capital (even though the Cherokees were named a "civilized
tribe" precisely because of their adoption of some of the trappings of
white political culture early on in their history).
Will Rogersdied in a plane crash in the summer of 1935. His
sudden death did not allow him to comment on the reform of federal Indian
policy begun by John Collier. Nevertheless, on June 8, 1934, he recorded
briefly his appreciation of Collier's efforts: "If that
Wheeler-Howard Indian bill don't pass there is no justice. I think we
got a real Indian agent in this man Collier. The Indian has just lost 100
years in his civilization, and Collier is trying to get him back" (DT
4:182). Ten days later, the Wheeler-Howard bill, a greatly modified
version of the Collier bill, became the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), a
major piece of legislation under which "any tribe or the people of any
reservation could organize themselves as a business corporation, adopt a
constitution and bylaws, and exercise some form of self-government" (Deloria and Lytle 5). The law also provided for the end
of allotment and for the restitution to tribes of unallotted{98} lands (Prucha
323). As usual, the act was applied to the Five Tribes in Oklahoma with some delay in the modified
form of the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act of 1936. While the modifications of
the original bill and the problems of administration of the reorganization
acts themselves took away the radical edge of Collier's original proposals,
the IRA and its modifications nevertheless brought back to the fore the
viability of Native sovereignty. When he went to Oklahoma to explain the original bill in
March 1934, Collier was met with great resistance by the Five Tribes in the
eastern part of the state, which were weary of reorganization (Prucha 327). Rogers,
however, had already commented approvingly on the bill. That as an
acculturated individual, living away from his homeland, Rogers could
appreciate the importance of the future IRA is telling of his abiding
interest in Indian affairs, not as an exotic component of American life and a
boost to his own career, but as a civilization in need of independent
existence.
His commentary on U.S.
politics gives the sense that, for Will Rogers, Native tribes are both at the
center of North America and somehow outside of the United States. This special place
from which the Native humorist speaks contributes to his particular brand of
humor despite the many concessions Rogers
necessarily makes to his audiences. If his political humor, then, is to be
acknowledged as American humor, it will have to be accepted with its call for
the end of both U.S.
politics and non-Native possession of the land on this continent.

NOTES

The following abbreviations
are used in citations throughout: WA for Rogers, Weekly Articles;
DT for Rogers, Daily Telegrams.
1. The program of Indian assimilation was
initially advocated by missionaries and politicians, mostly in the eastern United States,
who felt that the integration of individual Indians into American society, as
American farmers and citizens, would solve the "Indian problem." To
this end, boarding schools were set up to take Indian children away from
tribal lands and reservations in order to educate them in English,
Christianity, and basic industry, domestic and agricultural. The program of
assimilation is also known for {99} the passing of
allotment acts, which were meant to break up lands held in common by tribes
and allot these lands to individual Indians while appropriating the remaining
land and opening it for settlement by non-Native farmers. The first allotment
act was passed in 1886 on suggestion of Senator Dawes from Massachusetts and is therefore known as
the Dawes Allotment Act. This act, however, did not extent to the Five Tribes
in Indian Territory. It was only with the
passing of the Curtis Act in 1898 that Rogers's
Cherokee Nation was included in the allotment program.
Besides the allotment acts, Indians were
admitted to American citizenship through the campaign that the Society of
American Indians launched for citizenship rights of Indian soldiers returning
from World War I. Giving Indians citizenship through the final Indian
Citizenship Act of 1924 was therefore more of a symbolic than practical
gesture on the part of the U.S. government. In many states Indians could not
vote, and, as Frederick E. Hoxie claims, by the early twentieth century citizenship
had been devalued from ideals of equality to second-class citizenship
bolstered in part by the industrial boarding schools preparing Indian
children for menial jobs: "The successful Indians of the early twentieth
century were not the teachers, ministers, or yeomen farmers promised by the
nineteenth-century reformers. Now the highest praise was saved for hired
hands and construction laborers" (96). Furthermore, the citizenship acts
did not solve the problem of Indian identity. As Francis Paul Prucha points out, "The complete transition from
tribal status to individualized citizenship that the Dawes Act reformers had
had in mind when they talked about citizenship did not occur. The Indians
were both citizens of the United States and persons with tribal
relations" (273).
2. As his Boston
editor had written Lorimer in 1903, the humorous
letter series vogue had caught on in the Boston press, with title variations from
"Letters from a Son to His Self-Made Father" to "Letters from
a Taylor-Made Daughter to a Home-Made Mother" (Tebbel
31).
3. Rogers's
father, Clem Rogers, a prominent Cherokee politician, initially objected to
the infiltration of whites in Indian Territory but eventually capitulated
before the Curtis Act and the statehood of Oklahoma and after the dissolution of the
Cherokee government went on to serve in the Oklahoma
Senate (Wertheim and Blair 148-50).
4. Rogers
began writing his weekly articles in December 1922. The feature was
syndicated and eventually carried by six hundred newspapers around the
country. The articles began as transcriptions of Rogers's stage gags and progressively
developed in style. His editors did not correct Rogers's writing idiosyncrasies. The
misspellings, malapropisms, dialectisms, and
grammatical errors were considered crucial to his style. {100}
The first daily telegram was sent to the New
York Times during Rogers's
European trip in 1926. Like the weekly articles, the daily telegrams were
circulated by the McNaught Newspaper Syndicate in
hundreds of periodicals until Rogers's
death in 1935.
Sinclair was an oil producer involved in the Teapot Dome oil lease scandal during the Harding
administration. Jack Walton, a Democratic governor of Oklahoma, had given a barbecue at the
beginning of his administration, only to be later impeached and convicted on
"eleven counts of high crimes and misdemeanors." WA 1:377n1,
395n3.
5. The extent of political independence and
control the Five Tribes enjoyed in Indian Territory before its incorporation
into Oklahoma may not have been as
uncomplicatedly absolute as Rogers
remembers, but his memories importantly refer to the sovereignty of Indian
nations. Louis Owens defines the term "territory" negatively as
"clearly mapped, fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to
control and subdue the dangerous potentialities of imagined Indians"
(26). However, he remembers hearing his relatives refer to "growing up
in what they insisted on calling the 'Nation,'" meaning, as Owens later
realizes, the Cherokee Nation (150). His relatives' cherished memories of
growing up in the "Nation" are of the same order as Rogers's memories of growing up in Indian
Territory: they insist on the recognition of the sovereignty of
the Cherokee Nation. 6. Rogers engaged again the issue of nativism in an article from March 13, 1927:

Why,
the Astecs and the Cliff Dwellers, existed and had
civilization before the Meades, and the Persians,
and the Gauls . . . had even taken out their
citizenship papers in Rome or Greece.
. . . Why this country out here was established so long ahead of that back
there, that they ["Columbus and those gangs from Europe" who
"commenced to squat in this country"] were like a bunch of Tourists
visiting a country after these old Pioneers out here had blazed the trail so
far ahead of that Columbus bunch that the trail had grown up with Century
plants in the meantime.
Why, if Columbus
had landed at Galveston and marched inland to Santa Fe, New
Mexico he would have been met by the Cliff Dwellers
commercial Club, a delegation of modern "red men of the world," and
the AstecsRotarary. They
would have apologized to Columbus
for the primitive looks of the old end of town. (What they called Old town.)
"We can't get some of our old settlers here to change their ways, they
want to live like their great, great, great, grandfathers have {101} lived here before them." Columbus
would have remarked, "Pardon me gentlemen! I dident
discover a Country, I am just here paying my respects from a young country,
to an older one." (WA 3:4-5)

Rogers's stated goal is to chastise Americans for their
obsession with European antiquities and to attract them to visit Arizona and New
Mexico. What he actually achieves is a simultaneous
critique of the myth of Columbus's
"discovery" of North America and
of nativist definitions of modern American
citizenship. Writing in terms reminiscent of the passport scene in Letters
of a Self-Made Diplomat, Rogers builds up a humorous effect by
transposing twentieth-century realities (passports, tourism, nativism, and 100 percent Americanism) back into the
past. The indigenous population of North America
is described in the spirit of pioneer mythology with its emphasis on
precedence in time and on the staking of unclaimed land. His description of
the old settlers' unchanging ways spoofs the genealogical frenzy of tracing
back one's ancestors to North America as a
proof of authenticity. Ultimately, he shows that nativist
claims to North America are poaching on a
terrain that rightfully belongs to the indigenous population of the
continent. Rogers
speaks from a kind of Native nativist position that
invalidates the claims of his nativist
contemporaries on their own terms by claiming the self-righteousness of
precedence.
7. Rogers adds
to the lore his mock-sympathetic understanding of Columbus's
human error by reversing the myth of discovery when he, a Native American,
pretends to believe to have discovered the modern American city of St. Louis during his
first visit there: "Every guy thinks the first time he sees anything,
that that is the first time it ever existed. I will never forget the first
time I went to St. Louis.
I thought sure I was the first one to find it. But Lord, here it had been
reclining there in its own way for generations" (WA 3:5).
In a February 13, 1927, article, he satirizes
land speculation by retelling the story of the American Revolution as a
competition between Washington and Jefferson for a piece of real estate, the
Virginia Natural Bridge (WA 2: 305-06).
9. As a result of this mock campaign, Bob
Sherwood, the editor of Life, who wrote most of the material run
under Rogers's byline, was dismissed, which shows the ultimate
unacceptability of the campaign. The undifferentiated Sherwood-Rogers
coauthored essays have been published among the writings of Will Rogers
because, in Steven Gragert's defense of his
editorial decision, "Their humor and thrust bear his trademark" (He
Chews xv).

{102}
WORKS CITED

Blair, Walter. Horse Sense in American Humor: From Benjamin
Franklin to Ogden
Nash. 1942. New
York:
Russell and Russell, 1962.

Brown, William R. Imagemaker:
Will Rogers and the American Dream. Columbia:
University of
Missouri Press, 1970.

Deloria,
Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Avon Books,
1969.

Deloria,
Vine, Jr., and Clifford Lytle. The Nations Within: The Past and Future of
American Indian Sovereignty. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984.

Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate
the Indians, 1880-1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Ketchum, Richard M. Will Rogers:
His Life and Times. New
York:
Simon and Schuster, 1973.

Zissu,
Erik M. Blood Matters: The Five Civilized Tribes and the Search for Unity
in the Twentieth Century. New
York: Routledge, 2001.

{104}

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{105}

Contributor Biographies

JENNIFER ANDREWS is an associate professor
of English at University
of New Brunswick and the
coeditor of Studies in Canadian Literature.

ANDIE DIANE PALMER is an associate
professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.
Her book Maps of Experience: The Anchoring of Land to Story in Secwepemc Discourse was published by University of Toronto Press in 2005.

TYRA TWOMEY is ABD at SyracuseUniversity,
writing a dissertation about writers' acculturation into academic writing
cultures, particularly their legitimate and illegitimate conventions for
denoting and sharing authorial credit. Her pending degree is in composition
and cultural rhetoric, with specializations in pedagogy, authorship,
collaborative writing, and genre theory. She is currently editing a book
project about academic integrity for the university and an anthology of
fiction and poetry for an online literary journal.

LISA J. UDEL is an assistant professor of
English at IllinoisCollege. She received
her master's degree from IndianaUniversity and her doctorate from the University of Cincinnati. Her essay "Revision
and Resistance: The Politics of Native Women's Motherwork"
appeared in Gender through the Prism of Difference, published by Oxford
University Press in 2006.

ROUMIANA VELIKOVA has a JD from ThomasM.CooleyLawSchool and a PhD in English from
SUNY at Buffalo.
Her most recent work on ethnic American literature has appeared in Callalooand volume 5 of Recovering the
U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage.

{106}

Major Tribal Nations and
Bands
Mentioned in This Issue

This list is provided as a service to those
readers interested in further communications with the tribal communities and
governments of American Indian and Native nations. Inclusion of a government
in this list does not imply endorsement of or by SAIL in any regard,
nor does it imply the enrollment or citizenship status of any writer
mentioned; some communities have alternative governments and leadership that
are not affiliated with the United States,
Canada, or Mexico, while
others are not recognized by colonial governments. We have limited the list
to those most relevant to the essays published in this issue; thus, not all
bands, towns, or communities of a particular nation are listed.
We make every effort to provide the most
accurate and up-to-date tribal contact information available, a task that is
sometimes quite complicated. Please send any corrections or suggestions to SAIL
Editorial Assistant; Studies in American Indian Literatures;
Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures; 235 Bessey Hall; MichiganStateUniversity;
East Lansing, MI48824-1033,
or send an e-mail to sail2@msu.edu.